Safety Culture Survey results released

Earlier this year, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital surveyed staff working 20 hours or more with direct contact to patients using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Safety Culture Survey.

The Safety Culture Survey measures patient safety in 12 areas:

• Teamwork within Units
• Organizational Learning-Continuous Improvement
• Communication Openness
• Frequency of Events Reported
• Teamwork Across Units
• Staffing
• Supervisor/Manager Expectations and Promoting Patient Safety
• Management Support for Patient Safety
• Feedback and Communication about Error
• Overall Perceptions of Patient Safety
• Nonpunitive Response to Errors
• Handoffs and Transitions

Our results showed continued improvement in many areas with 50 percent of our scores significantly improving, meaning that the results improved by two percent or more from our previous survey.

Our strongest area was Teamwork within Units, scoring a 74 percent overall rating. We also outperform the national average on Nonpunitive Response to Error, which we attribute to our consistent use of the High Reliability and Just Culture models to review events that happen in the hospital where we focus on finding and fixing risk points within our systems of care rather than blaming people.

Our lowest scoring area is Handoffs and Transitions at 46 percent. Low scoring questions in this area indicate staff worry about things falling between the cracks when transferring patients from one area to another or things getting lost in shift changes. Another area of concern is the low scoring Teamwork Across Units at 59 percent.

In the days to come, leadership in each area in the hospital will be getting individual scores for their department. We are charging each director to use the creativity and passion of local team members to tackle the problems around Handoffs and Transitions and Teamwork Across Units. To do this, we need your to:

• Continue to report concerns of all kinds using RL Solutions, our safety reporting system.
• Participate in your local department work to develop standardized handoffs.
• Identify the specific issues around teamwork across units that are impacting patients in your area and contribute to the plans to address these risk points.

We will highlight the improvement work from the departments in leadership meetings and in BWFH Pulse in the coming months.

Please email Christi Clark Barney, MSN, RN, Executive Director of Patient Safety, Quality, Risk Management, Infection Control, CDI and Clinical Compliance, at cbarney@bwh.harvard.edu if you have any questions about the survey or ideas that will contribute to enhancing the work on which we are embarking.