A novel tool for organisational learning and its impact on safety culture in a hospital dispensary

Incident reporting as a key mechanism for organisational learning and the establishment of a stronger safety culture are pillars of the current patient safety movement. Studies have suggested that incident reporting in healthcare does not achieve its full potential due to serious barriers to reporting and that sometimes staff may feel alienated by the process. The aim of the work reported in this paper was to prototype a novel approach to organisational learning that allows an organisation to assess and to monitor the status of processes that often give rise to latent failure conditions in the work environment, and to assess whether and through which mechanisms participation in this approach affects local safety culture. The approach was prototyped in a hospital dispensary using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, and the effect on safety culture was described qualitatively through semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that the approach has had a positive effect on the safety culture within the dispensary, and that staff perceive the approach to be useful and usable

An organisation without a memory : a qualitative study of hospital staff perceptions on reporting and organisational learning for patient safety

Following the Public Enquiry into avoidable deaths and poor standards of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, the English National Health Service (NHS) is aiming to become a system devoted to continual learning and improvement of patient care. The paper aims to explore current perceptions of healthcare staff towards reporting and organisational learning for improving patient safety. Based on a Thematic Analysis of semi-structured interviews with 35 healthcare professionals in two NHS organisations, the paper argues that previously identified barriers to incident reporting remain problematic, and that less centralised processes that aim to learn from everyday clinical work might be better suited to generate actionable learning and change in the local work environment. The findings might support healthcare organisations in understanding better the practical processes of organisational learning at the local level. The findings might also support researchers in developing new approaches and strategies for integrating learning about risk at the local level with effective organisational change to improve patient safety

Managing the patient safety risks of bottom-up health information technology innovations : recommendations for healthcare providers

Health information technology (IT) offers exciting opportunities for providing novel services to patients, and for improving the quality and safety of care. However, the introduction of IT can lead to unintended consequences, and create opportunities for failure, which can have significant effects on patient safety. In this paper I argue that many health IT patient safety risks are probably quite predictable, but are often not considered at the time. This puts patients at risk, and it threatens the successful adoption of health IT. I recommend that healthcare providers focus on strengthening their processes for organisational learning, promote proactive risk management strategies, and make risk management decisions transparent and explicit

What keeps patients safe? A Resilience Engineering perspective

In this paper I explore the potential contribution a Resilience Engineering perspective could offer towards a better understanding and improvement of patient safety. I argue that performance variability is an essential component in the delivery of safe care, as practitioners translate tensions they encounter in their everyday work into safe practices through dynamic trade-offs based on their experience and the requirements of the specific situation. Health care organisations and health policy makers should consider identifying ways that enable organisations to learn about performance variability and trade-offs from everyday clinical work

Organisational reporting and learning systems : innovating inside and outside of the box

Reporting and learning systems are key organisational tools for the management and prevention of clinical risk. However, current approaches, such as incident reporting, are struggling to meet expectations of turning health systems like the UK National Health Service (NHS) into learning organisations. This article aims to open up debate on the potential for novel reporting and learning systems in healthcare, by reflecting on experiences from two recent projects: Proactive Risk Monitoring in Healthcare (PRIMO) and Errordiary in Healthcare. These two approaches demonstrate how paying attention to ordinary, everyday clinical work can derive useful learning and active discussion about clinical risk. We argue that innovations in reporting and learning systems might come from both inside and outside of the box. ‘Inside’ being along traditional paths of controlled organisational innovation. ‘Outside’ in the sense that inspiration comes outside of the healthcare domain, or more extremely, outside official channels through external websites and social media (e.g. patient forums, public review sites, whistleblower blogs and Twitter streams). Reporting routes that bypass official channels could empower staff and patient activism, and turn out to be a driver to challenge organisational processes, assumptions and priorities where the organisation is failing and has become unresponsive

Safety of patient handover in emergency care – results of a qualitative study

The paper presents the results of a qualitative study investigating safety of patient handover in the emergency care pathway. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 39 practitioners from two NHS ambulance services and three hospitals in England. Thematic analysis identified two main themes: (1) there are tensions in the activity of handover, which practitioners deal with by making dynamic trade-offs based on their expertise and depending on the particular situation; (2) the management of patient and information flows across organisational boundaries is a key factor affecting the quality and safety of handover. The results suggest that there is a need for greater collaboration across organisational boundaries, and that organisational policies and procedures should provide flexibility to practitioners enabling them to make necessary local trade-offs based on their expertis

Learning from incidents in health care : critique from a Safety-II perspective

Patients are continually being put at risk of harm, and health care organisations are struggling to learn effectively from past experiences in order to improve the safe delivery and management of care. Learning from incidents in health care is based on the traditional safety-engineering paradigm, where safety is defined by the absence of negative events (Safety-I). In this paper we make suggestions for the policy and practice of learning from incidents in health care by offering a critique based on a Safety-II perspective. In Safety-II thinking safety is defined as an ability - to make dynamic trade-offs and to adjust performance in order to meet changing demands and to deal with disturbances and surprises. The paper argues that health care organisations might improve their ability to learn from past experience by studying not only what goes wrong (i.e. incidents), but also by considering what goes right, i.e. by learning from everyday clinical work