Key recommendations from Shining a Light: Safer Health Care Through Transparency
| Target of recommendation | Recommendation |
| All stakeholders | Ensure disclosure of conflicts of interest and provide patients with reliable information in a form that is useful to them. Create organisational cultures that support transparency, shared learning and core competencies regarding communication with patients and families, other clinicians and the public. |
| Leaders and boards | Prioritise transparency and safety and frequently review comprehensive safety performance data. Link hiring, firing, promotion and compensation to results in cultural transformation and transparency. |
| Governmental agencies | Develop data sources for collection of safety data, improve standards and training materials for core competencies and develop an all-payer database and robust medical device registries. |
| Clinicians | Inform patients of clinician’s experience, conflicts of interest and role in care and provide patients with a full description of all the alternatives for tests and treatments and the pros and cons for each. Provide patients with full information about all planned tests and treatments. |
| Hospitals and health systems | Provide patients with full access to their medical records and include patients and family members in interdisciplinary bedside rounds. |
| Hospitals and health systems, health professionals | Provide patients and families with full information about any harm resulting from treatment, followed by apology and fair resolution. Provide patients and clinicians support when they are involved in an incident. Include patients/family members in event reporting and in root cause analysis. |
| Hospital and health leaders | Create a safe, supportive culture for caregivers to be transparent and accountable to each other. Create multidisciplinary processes and forms for reporting, analysing and sharing data. Create processes to hold individuals accountable for risky or disruptive behaviour. |
| Healthcare organisations, hospital associations, PSOs | Have clear mechanisms for sharing and adopting best practices, for example, by participating in state and regional collaboratives. |
| Hospitals and healthcare organisations | Report and publicly display measures used to monitor quality and safety and clearly communicate to the public about performance. |
PSOs, patient safety organisations.