Patients and family members identified the factors that contributed to their respective adverse incidents, such as not following safety measures and lack of communication. Participants stated that they were not involved in the analysis process of the adverse events, so they missed out on ways to become more involved in learning about adverse events and how they can be decreased in the healthcare setting. Thus, the authors of this article emphasize that healthcare systems should implement educational modules that not only help decrease the risk of adverse events, but also teach healthcare professionals, patients, and family members on how to be proactive in preventing them.

Authors of this article emphasize how the “no blame” approach should be balanced with accountability when promoting patient safety in healthcare settings. However, this balance should be distributed among healthcare professionals, patients, and family members when effectively improving and promoting patient care and safety.

Improving how health care providers respond to medical injury requires an understanding of patients’ experiences. Although many injured patients strongly desire to be heard, research rarely involves them. Institutional review boards worry about harming participants by asking them to revisit traumatic events, and hospital staff worry about provoking lawsuits. Institutions’ reluctance to approve this type of research has slowed progress toward responses to injuries that are better able to meet patients’ needs. In 2015-2016, we were able to surmount these challenges and interview 92 injured patients and families in the USA and New Zealand. This article explores whether the ethical and medico-legal concerns are, in fact, well-founded. Consistent with research about trauma-research-related distress, our participants’ accounts indicate that the pervasive fears about retraumatization are unfounded. Our experience also suggests that because being heard is an important (but often unmet) need for injured patients, talking provides psychological benefits and may decrease rather than increase the impetus to sue. Our article makes recommendations to institutional review boards and researchers. The benefits to responsibly conducted research with injured patients outweigh the risks to participants and institutions.

In this study, conference and process leaders were divided into three groups Morbidity and Mortality Conferences (MMCs), Educational Conferences, and Quality Assurance (QA) Meetings) to review adverse incidents and near misses, as well as to find ways to prevent them in the future as well as to promote patient safety. Researchers found that it is important to incorporate various approaches and clinical practices to effectively promote patient safety in the healthcare setting.

Previous studies suggest that psychologically safe workplaces foster a feeling of comfort among employees, allowing them to feel comfortable with taking risks, such as identifying mistakes in the workplace. In this study, researchers analyzed the levels of psychological safety in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals, and studied its relationship to employees’ comfort in disclosing medical mistakes. Researchers found that only a minority of workers were uncomfortable in admitting mistakes, and their discomfort was due to fear of retaliation.

Zerillo, Tardiff, Flood, Sokol-Hesner, and Weiss retrospectively coded 148 corrective actions from 67 safety events brought to a tertiary care academic medical center’s multidisciplinary hospital-level safety event review meeting from 2020 to 2021. They coded by category and strength, using the US Department of Veterans Affairs/Institute for Healthcare Improvement Action Hierarchy Tool. They found an inverse relationship between intervention strength and completion; the strongest interventions had the lowest rate of completion. Also, the majority of corrective actions were categorized as weak.

This article highlights the importance of developing systems for tracking the completion of corrective actions. Without tracking data on completion, organizations cannot know how well they are mitigating the risks to safety that their analyses have identified. By integrating action strength and completion status into corrective action follow-up, healthcare organizations may more effectively identify and address those barriers to completing the strongest interventions that ultimately achieve high reliability.

The National Patient Safety Foundation conducted a study to investigate the effectiveness of root Cause Analyses and Actions, or RCA² (RCA “squared”), in healthcare settings. RCA² is a model used by health professionals to understand why mistakes occur in the workplace, and how to develop strategies to prevent them in future situations. National Patient Safety Foundation specifically concentrated on the specific methods used by the RCA² model, and analyzed if they were effective or not. They also identified defects in the model and sought out ways on how to improve them, so they model could be efficient.

Researchers concluded that an organizational culture characterized by anonymity, rewards and recognition for staff members making reports, grassroots involvement in the review and interpretation of data, and use of external sources of error data is critical for establishing a process truly capable of creating safety. This process for changing culture can be applied in any health care system desiring to improve the safety of the medication use process.

The authors of this article analyzed how medical mistakes and injuries are correlated with high healthcare costs and poor patient quality. To lower these rates, the authors emphasized the importance of implementing an incident reporting system in healthcare settings. The implementation of these systems involve changing the culture of the workplace, so it promotes learning, flexibility, and blamelessness.

The authors of this study analyzed the importance of healthcare professionals being transparent in medical malpractices with their patients in the Texas healthcare system. The authors found that medical mishap litigation helped significantly reduce suing and other damages. The authors also emphasized the importance for healthcare systems to work with attorneys, policy makers, and patients to help develop methods to be more transparent about medical mishaps and enforce proactive mediation.

This white paper introduces an overall approach and tools designed to support two processes: the proactive preparation of a plan for managing serious clinical adverse events, and the reactive emergency response of an organization that has no such plan.

Every day, clinical adverse events occur within our health care system, causing physical and psychological harm to one or more patients, their families, staff (including medical staff), the community, and the organization. In the crisis that often emerges, what differentiates organizations, positively or negatively, is their culture of safety, the role of the board of trustees and executive leadership, advanced planning for such an event, the balanced prioritization of the needs of the patient and family, staff, and organization, and how actions immediately and over time bring empathy, support, resolution, learning, and improvement. The risks of not responding to these adverse events in a timely and effective manner are significant, and include loss of trust, absence of healing, no learning and improvement, the sending of mixed messages about what is really important to the organization, increased likelihood of regulatory action or lawsuits, and challenges by the media.

The paper includes three tools for leaders (as appendices) — a Checklist, a Work Plan, and a Disclosure Culture Assessment Tool — and numerous resources to guide practice. The three tools are also included below as individual documents for ease of use.

The 2011 (second edition) update reflects a number of suggested improvements and clarifications, including new content on reimbursement and compensation as part of any discussion of disclosure and resolution, and disclosure of errors that have occurred at another institution, among other updates. Additional citations, resources, and examples from organizations mounting effective crisis responses are also included.

In this New England Journal of Medicine Perspective, Thomas H. Gallagher, M.D., and Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D explore how in the modern ethical paradigm, any time harm occurs, clinicians and healthcare organizations are accountable for minimizing suffering and promoting learning, and why doing so is especially challenging when the harm was due to an error.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is an organization that aims to improve healthcare systems worldwide. The IHI published Safety is Personal: Partnering with Patients an Families for the Safest Care, a report on patient safety and quality. This report provides specific action steps for healthcare providers and policy makers to establish patient and family engagement in various dimensions of healthcare.

This commentary spotlights elements of ophthalmology practice that can influence error disclosure, particularly the prevalence of patients receiving care from optometrists outside the hospital environment with no central reporting mechanism.

Sidney Dekker, the author of Second Victim: Error, Guilt, Trauma, and Resilience, discusses how healthcare professionals are considered second victims in medical mishaps, because of the trauma and guilt they experience int the wake of these incidents. In his book, Dekker details efficient ways to investigate medically adverse events so that healthcare professionals do not feel neglected or more guilty in the process. Dekker also emphasizes the importance of having support systems in healthcare settings for second victims.

Serious Illness Care Program COVID-19 Response Toolkit by Ariadne Labs, first version was published on April 3, 2020.

Ariadne Labs, one of Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement’s partners in cultivating high-quality, patient-centered care, has developed the Serious Illness Care Program’s COVID-19 Response Toolkit to help clinicians with difficult conversations with high risk COVID-19 patients.

Table of Contents: 

1. COVID-19 Conversation Guide for Outpatient Care
2. Telehealth Communication Tips
3. Recommendation Aid
4. Care Planning Resources

The NPSF Lucian Leape Institute Roundtable on Transparency published “Shining a Light: Safer Healthcare Through Transparency,” a report focused on being honest in four healthcare settings: between healthcare workers and patients; between healthcare professionals and the institutions; between institutions; and between institutions and the greater public. Transparency is defined as “the free flow of information that is open to the scrutiny of others,” and it is related with better healthcare outcomes, decreased rates of medical mishaps, lower healthcare costs, and increased rates of patient satisfaction.

Dr. Atul Gawande, general surgeon and part-time professor at Harvard University, analyzed the histories of various medical innovations, such as anesthesia and oral re-hydration therapy, and why they were successful or unsuccessful in swift diffusion. General obstacles included resistance from healthcare professionals, as well as weariness that the method was unsuccessful. However, general reasons why other methods were successful was because they combat the negative effects of germs and pain.

Data from case studies support the fact that apologies from physicians to patients promote reconciliation and forgiveness. To promote a culture that supports apologizing and disclosure, 39 states, including Washington, D.C., are enacting apology policies to decrease the litigation problems surrounding medical malpractice. This article is delves into the implications surrounding the enactment of these laws. The article is divided into four parts. The first part of the article explains why states are passing apology laws and how they can help reduce lawsuits associated with medical malpractice. The second part presents data that supports the effectiveness of apology laws. The third part illustrates how apology laws affect various legal outcomes, especially the probability that medical providers will be presented with litigation fees. The fourth part of the article delves into the legal significance of their results. It is important to note that apology laws do not replace communication-and-resolution programs (CRPs), nor do they mitigate the existing data that these programs are effective in lowering the incidence rates of medical error claims.

Streamed live on May 6, 2015 Clinicians encounter many stressors during their careers, none more significant than a difficult patient event that results in harm. Acknowledging that clinicians make seldom use of traditional support services, leading health centers across the US are pioneering Peer Support Programs that make available a trained and compassionate network of peers who can reach out and provide 1:1 support to a clinician experiencing stress.

In this live video event, we are honored to host the leading authority in the field, Dr. Jo Shaprio of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in conversation with Dr. Bryan Bohman, physician leader of Stanford Medicine’s Peer Support Program, to explore the following questions:

• What is motivating leading institutions to establish Peer Support Programs?
• How do Peer Support Programs work? How do they differ from existing support services?
• How effective are they? What do the data say?
• What best practices have emerged?
• What challenges need to be overcome?

The Risk Authority – Stanford, in partnership with Aon Risk Solutions, Lockton UK and MedPro Group invite you to participate in this exciting opportunity to learn about and explore Peer Support Programs from leading experts in the field.

Read more here.

In the BMJ Quality & Safety Study (2009), researchers studied why clinicians are often considered “second victims” in the wake of medical errors. The researchers delved into how healthcare providers recover from the guilt and stress involved medical errors, and discuss the elements related to recovery and delineate from the second victim phenomenon. These factors include moving forward, receiving emotional support, and reestablishing a sense of integrity. Researchers recommended that it is important to for healthcare institutions to implement support systems that not only offer emotional aid but also decrease the likelihood of future adverse events.

Researchers acknowledged how a majority of adverse medical events involve patient harm. Patients and family are known as first victims. Researchers also acknowledged how healthcare professionals are also considered victims after an adverse event, due to the emotional and psychological trauma experienced after it. In other words, healthcare professionals are also known as second victims. In this study, researchers analyzed the various coping strategies that clinicians use in the wake of adverse events. These strategies include attending programs that offer emotional aid second victims, as well as taking accountability for the situation and learning from it.

The Beryl Institute is a community of practice with the goals of improving patient care and experience though teamwork and share values. The institute define patient experience as the sum of all interactions, influenced by an institution’s culture, that impact patient perceptions of healthcare. Among the Beryl Institute’s various goals to improve patient experience and care, they are committed to prioritizing patients, families, and care providers first; emphasizing the importance of the entire healthcare team; and engaging a variety of perceptions and voices from various sectors.

The Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement is a network based at the University of Washington, Seattle, composed of the physicians, attorneys, and insurers who pioneered the earliest CRPs in the United States. It is our belief that communication-and-resolution programs (CRPs) are an essential strategy for preventing medical errors and cultivating high-quality, patient-centered healthcare. Our mission is to radically accelerate the adoption of CRPs nationally and internationally, particularly through education, training, and hands-on support.

In The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error,’ Sidney Dekker discusses how organizations can successfully deal with perceived “human error” without implementing new rules, punishing people, or requesting compliance. Dekker discusses how people embody “the Bad Apple Theory,” which states that an institution would be safe and reliable albeit a few irresponsible individuals in it. To combat this theory and “human error,” Dekker encourages organizations to learn to understand mistakes, how to improve investigative processes, and how to increase the safety climate of the workplace. He does this by offering specific strategies that encourage organizations and employees to think creatively to foster a safe environment that mitigates “human error.”

Authors of this article discuss how hard factors act as obstacles in change management. Hard factors have three characteristics: 1) Corporations can measure them in implicit and explicit ways, 2) corporations can communicate these factors both within in and outside of organizations, and 3) corporations can rapidly influence the previous elements. Authors emphasize that it is necessary for businesses to prioritize the hard factors before they can move forward and improve.

University of Michigan Health System developed the Michigan Model. This approach involves reducing and acknowledging medical errors through open communication between the patient and health institution, peer-reviewing the complaints to analyze the cause of the adverse event and how to prevent it in the future, and meeting with the patient and legal counsel to discuss the adverse event. With these implementations, the University of Michigan Health System successfully helped reduce the number of malpractice accusation against physicians, medical error fees, and total time it takes to manage a malpractice claim. Thus, the University of Michigan Health System is a leading innovator in increasing patient care and safety while also decreasing the adverse outcomes associated with medical malpractices.

This article focuses on the negative impacts adverse events have on healthcare professionals. Specifically, they feel a sense of inadequacy, shame, and personal grief. As a result, healthcare professionals are dubbed “second victims” of these incidents. The article also delves into obstacles that prevent healthcare professionals from seeking assistance. These obstacles include not wanting to be perceived as vulnerable or weak in front of their coworkers. To assist second victims and their recovery and combat the stigma associated with seeking help, health institutions are encouraged to develop holistic support systems.