Patient-centered insights: Using health care complaints to reveal hot spots and blind spots in quality and safety (11 September 2018)

Summary

The use of healthcare complaints to improve quality and safety has been limited by a lack of reliable analysis tools and uncertainty about the insights that can be obtained. The Healthcare Complaints Analysis Tool, developed by Alex Gillespie and Tom W. Reader was used to analyse a benchmark national data set, conceptualise a systematic analysis, and identify the added value of complaint data.

Content

Policy Points:

• Healthcare complaints contain valuable data on quality and safety; however, there is no reliable method of analysis to unlock their potential.
• The authors demonstrate a method to analyse healthcare complaints that provides reliable insights on hot spots (where harm and near misses occur) and blind spots (before admissions, after discharge, systemic and low-level problems, and errors of omission).
• Systematic analysis of healthcare complaints can improve quality and safety by providing patient-centred insights that localise issues and shed light on difficult-to-monitor problems.