BMJ quality & safety
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BMJ quality & safety · Jan 2019
Speaking up about patient safety concerns: the influence of safety management approaches and climate on nurses' willingness to speak up.
Speaking up is important for patient safety, but healthcare professionals often hesitate to voice their concerns. Direct supervisors have an important role in influencing speaking up. However, good insight into the relationship between managers' behaviour and employees' perceptions about whether speaking up is safe and worthwhile is still lacking. ⋯ Results provide initial support that nurses who perceive higher levels of commitment-based safety management feel safer to take interpersonal risks and are more willing to speak up about patient safety concerns. Furthermore, nurses' perceptions of control-based safety management are found to be positively related to a climate for safety, although no association was found with speaking up. Both control-based and commitment-based management approaches seem to be relevant for managing patient safety, but when it comes to encouraging speaking up, a commitment-based safety management approach seems to be most valuable.
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BMJ quality & safety · Jan 2019
Rate of avoidable deaths in a Norwegian hospital trust as judged by retrospective chart review.
The proportion of avoidable hospital deaths is challenging to estimate, but has great implications for quality improvement and health policy. Many studies and monitoring tools are based on selected high-risk populations, which may overestimate the proportion. Mandatory reporting systems, however, under-report. We hypothesise that a review of an unselected sample of hospital deaths will provide an estimate of avoidability in-between the estimates from these methods. ⋯ Avoidable hospital deaths occur less frequently than estimated by the national monitoring tool, but much more frequently than reported through mandatory reporting systems. Regular reviews of an unselected sample of hospital deaths are likely to provide a better estimate of the proportion of avoidable deaths than the current methods.