Culture of Safety: an overview (28 October 2019)

Summary

Numerous studies show a link between a positive safety culture (where safety is a shared priority) and improved patient safety within a healthcare organisation. The evidence is so convincing that the US National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) lists leadership support for a safety culture as the most important of eight recommendations for achieving patient safety.

This overview from the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) provides guidance and recommendations on how to embed approaches to safety culture within healthcare organisations.

Content

Key recommendations

• Communicate leadership support for a culture of safety.
• Model expected behaviour within a safety culture.
• Develop and enforce a code of conduct that defines appropriate behaviour to support a culture of safety and unacceptable behaviour that can undermine it.
• Create an environment in which people can speak up about errors without fear of punishment; use the information to identify the system flaws that contribute to mistakes.
• Apply a fair and consistent approach to evaluate the actions of staff involved in patient safety incidents.
• Support event reporting of near misses, unsafe conditions, and adverse events.
• Identify and address organisational barriers to event reporting.
• Cultivate an organisation-wide willingness to examine system weaknesses and use the findings to improve care delivery.
• Promote collaboration across ranks and disciplines to seek solutions to identified safety problems.
• Periodically assess the safety culture of an organisation to track changes and improvements over time.