The measurement and monitoring of safety (Health Foundation, April 2013)

Summary

In this document, Charles Vincent and colleagues from Imperial College London, propose a new framework to help find the elusive answer to the question – how safe is care today?

Content

This framework highlights the following five dimensions, which the authors believe should be included in any safety and monitoring approach in order to give a comprehensive and rounded picture of an organisation’s safety:

• Past harm: this encompasses both psychological and physical measures.
• Reliability: this is defined as ‘failure free operation over time’ and applies to measures of behaviour, processes and systems.
• Sensitivity to operations: the information and capacity to monitor safety on an hourly or daily basis.
• Anticipation and preparedness: the ability to anticipate, and be prepared for, problems.
• Integration and learning: the ability to respond to, and improve from, safety information.