Putting out fires: a qualitative study exploring the use of patient complaints to drive improvement at three academic hospitals (May 2019)

Summary

Recent years have seen increasing calls for more proactive use of patient complaints to develop effective system-wide changes, analogous to the intended functions of incident reporting and root cause analysis (RCA) to improve patient safety. Given recent questions regarding the impact of RCAs on patient safety, the authors sought to explore the degree to which current patient complaints processes generate solutions to recurring quality problems.