*TS:Effective Leadership: Building a Strong Safety Culture in Your Hospital[®] [REF: GB, LDR, PI, SFT] The Source, June 2014, Vol 12, #6, Pg 9 JCs1406_B3

TJC is clearly striving to be a leader in the effort to bring high reliability to health care.  To that end they have clearly identified what they believe are the 3 critical factors for doing so… Robust Process Improvement, Leadership and a Culture of Safety. The latter two are the focus of this article that provides 8 leadership strategies for advancing development of a strong safety culture as required by LD.03.01.01.  For example, if more than half of the respondents to your Safety Culture Survey* do not feel safe in reporting errors, this finding could/should be the basis for an improvement effort.  This article references 2 very useful tools: the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture and James Reason’s Culpability Model.  Please click the comment link below to share whether or not your facility uses either tool and if so what the experience has been.  Other strategies include:

• Recognize and act on warning signals
• Beware of oversimplified solutions (e.g., education/training or new/modified policy) that fail to address the system level issue
• Make it safer for staff to report errors, near-misses and unsafe conditions by using a consistent, transparent approach to accountability
• Be transparent in sharing the status of organizational safety and results of safety initiatives
• Utilize appropriate frontline staff to help improve system level safety issues related to areas where they have hands-on experience/expertise
• “Tolerate nothing less than respect” among and between all levels of staff:staff and staff:patient interaction and communication

Tip: If you are not already doing so, consider using the AHRQ Patient Safety Culture Survey referenced in this article; identify an improvement opportunity in its results and implement a safety culture improvement goal/initiative related to it.

Tip:  If you are not already doing so, consider formally adopting the James Reason Culpability Model  referenced in this article, for determining accountability/blameworthiness in response to reported errors, near-misses and unsafe conditions.