Rooting an error review process in Just Culture: Lessons learned (1 September 2022)

Summary

Repeated culture of safety surveys of the nursing staff at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s main campus demonstrated lagging scores in the domain of nonpunitive responses to error. The hospital had tried for many years to address the problem using a variety of strategies, including small group training sessions on just culture for staff and leaders, but had met with limited success. Finally, in 2015, it committed to trying something genuinely different—even perhaps disruptive—that might actually shift the stagnant metrics. Their novel, multifaceted programme, implemented over a two-year period, yielded a 13% increase in staff rating scores that the hospital has been able to sustain over the subsequent two-year period. 

The design and rollout of our program was neither simple nor smooth, but valuable lessons were learned about realistic, operational implementation of principles of psychological safety in a large and complex clinical organisation. In this paper, Neiswender et al. describe the programme and the lessons learned in the journey from idea inception to post-implementation.

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