mcn healthcare logo

The Essential Role of Leadership in Developing a Safety Culture

Hospital Leadership

The Essential Role of Leadership in Developing a Safety Culture

Where does your organization stand on a culture of safety and quality? Ronald Wyatt, MD, MHA, DMS (HON) former patient safety officer and medical director at the Joint Commission states the following, “ While the US healthcare system is the best in the world, it remains an unsafe system.  The most common causes of harm in systems are failures in communication, teamwork and leadership.  The healthcare system remains focused on a culture of blame and not on how the system failed.” (Wyatt, R. (2017)

Last week, The Joint Commission issued Sentinel Event Alert 57 addressing the essential role of leadership in developing a safety culture.  Organizational leaders are fundamental to the existence of a culture of safety and quality. According to TJC, sentinel event data reveals that, “…leadership’s failure to create an effective safety culture is a contributing factor to many types of adverse events – from wrong site surgery to delays in treatment.”

Sentinel Event 57 reviews the components and importance of a safety culture and the concerning findings of increased reports of retaliation and intimidation of health care team members voicing concern about safety issues.  In the Alert, TJC makes several recommendations that can help organizational leaders continuously improve a safety culture:

  • Develop and implement an organizational-wide and easy-to-use reporting system. A “…transparent, non-punitive approach to reporting and learning from adverse events, close calls and unsafe conditions…” is critical to success.
  • Establish clear, just, and transparent risk-based processes for recognizing and separating human error and error arising from poorly designed systems from unsafe or reckless actions that are blameworthy.
  • Ensure that the CEO and Hospital Leadership model appropriate, non-intimidating behaviors and champion those behaviors within the organization.
  • Establish, enforce and communicate to all team members the policies for supporting the culture of safety; reporting adverse events; close calls; identifying unsafe conditions and submitting safety improvement suggestions.
  • Establish a baseline and continually measure safety culture performance; find opportunities for improvements in quality and safety by analyzing safety culture survey results on both an organization-wide level and a unit-based level.

Bottom line – a culture of safety and quality starts at the top.

Reference:

Ronald Wyatt, MD, MHA, DMS (HON) (2017) Building Safe, Highly Reliable Organizations: CQO Shares Words of Wisdom. Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology: Jan./Feb. 2017, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 65-69. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2345/0899-8205-51.1.65)

MCN Healthcare Related Products

Leadership Manual

StayAlert! Sign-up for a FREE TRIAL and get access to policies and procedures associated with Sentinel Event 57

MCN HEALTHCARE

Regulatory Compliance Solutions for Healthcare Organizations
Our comprehensive compliance suite includes:

Policy Management Software |  Policy Library Templates
StayAlert! – Regulatory Alert System  |  Learning Management System

Learn more. Visit mcnhealthcare.com

 

 

We are expanding our team! Click here for more information.

Got it!
X