ResearchObstetricsA comprehensive obstetrics patient safety program improves safety climate and culture
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
We sequentially introduced multiple patient safety interventions from December 2002 to November 2006 at a university-based obstetrics service at Yale–New Haven Hospital. The details of this program have been previously described.10 Briefly, the effort involved the initiation of the following interventions:
Results
Details of the numbers of surveys that were administered and returned are listed in the Table. The median total number of employees who responded to each survey was 191 (range, 183–198). Overall response rates were 89%, 95%, 94%, and 72% for each period of administration respectively (median, 91.5%). The last survey (2009) added our postpartum staff, which accounted for a larger number of surveys that were administered. Although this administration period showed the lowest response rate, the
Comment
Berenholtz and Pronovost17 have proposed a safety scorecard that consists of 4 domains: outcome measures (How often do we harm patients?), process measures (How often do we use evidence-based medicine?), structural measures (How do we know we learned from our mistakes?), and staff attitudes surveys (How well have we created a culture of safety?).
We describe the overall improvement of safety climate, as measured by workforce surveys, in the setting of a comprehensive patient safety effort. In a
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge MCIC Vermont, Inc, its leadership, and the individual hospitals of MCIC Vermont, Inc, that contributed with similar patient safety initiatives at their own institutions.
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Supported in part by MCIC Vermont, Inc (New York, NY) as a quality assurance activity.
Reprints not available from the authors.
Cite this article as: Pettker CM, Thung SF, Raab CA, et al. A comprehensive obstetrics patient safety program improves safety climate and culture. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2011;204:216.e1-6.