Journal of patient safety
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2012
Exploring relationships between patient safety culture and patients' assessments of hospital care.
The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among 2 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality measures of hospital patient safety and quality, which reflect different perspectives on hospital performance: the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (Hospital SOPS)-a hospital employee patient safety culture survey-and the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Hospital Survey (CAHPS Hospital Survey)-a survey of the experiences of adult inpatients with hospital care and services. Our hypothesis was that these 2 measures would be positively related. ⋯ This study found that hospitals where staff have more positive perceptions of patient safety culture tend to have more positive assessments of care from patients. This finding helps validate both surveys and suggests that improvements in patient safety culture may lead to improved patient experience with care. Further research is needed to determine the generalizability of these results to larger sets of hospitals, to hospital units, and to other settings of care.
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Journal of patient safety · Sep 2012
A safety culture transformation: its effects at a children's hospital.
To improve pediatric patient safety at a tertiary, 200-bed children's hospital by changing the safety culture and implementing processes, practices, and measures to sustain improvements. Although many core quality and safety measures exist for adult acute-care facilities, equivalent measures for pediatrics are lacking. ⋯ The initiative led to key improvements in safety culture and patient safety and also had a broad impact on several clinical quality outcome measures. Using safety metrics improves transparency and enables future benchmarking with peer institutions to help improve pediatric patient safety nationwide. Because of the initiative's success in our children's hospital, the entire Spectrum Health system, including more than 16,000 staff members, is now undertaking a similar effort.
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Journal of patient safety · Jun 2012
Safety in the home healthcare sector: development of a new household safety checklist.
Unsafe household conditions could adversely affect safety and quality in home health care. However, risk identification tools and procedures that can be readily implemented in this setting are lacking. To address this need, we developed and tested a new household safety checklist and accompanying training program. ⋯ Home healthcare paraprofessionals can be effectively trained to identify commonplace household hazards. Using this checklist as a guide, visual household inspections were easily performed by trained HHCPS. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the reliability of the checklist and to determine if hazard identification leads to interventions that improve performance outcomes.
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Journal of patient safety · Mar 2012
An examination of opportunities for the active patient in improving patient safety.
Patients can make valuable contributions to their health care safety. Little is known, however, about the factors that could affect patient participation in safety-related aspects of their health care management. Examining and understanding how patient involvement in safety-related behaviors can be conceptualized will allow greater insight into why patients may be more willing to participate in some behaviors more than others may. ⋯ We believe that thinking of patient involvement in safety relating to properties and characteristics of the behavior together with the barriers to involvement could aid the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions aimed at encouraging patient participation. It will also enable a greater understanding and assessment of not only what interventions may be effective (at encouraging patient involvement) but when they might be effective (i.e., what stage of the care pathway) and why.