Patient Safety Culture Resource Development for Primary Care Clinics
About the Project
Patient safety culture, particularly in a community care setting, is a developing field with an evolving evidence base. Since the Institute of Medicines report To Err is Human, released in 1999, medical errors in acute care were highlighted as a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States, effectively putting patient safety to the forefront for healthcare organizations everywhere as a part of providing quality care. In addition to launching a patient safety culture survey for use in primary care clinics in Alberta, the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) was interested in developing a resource to enable clinics to action on the findings of the surveys; W21C was contracted to prepare this resource. Using the AHRQ Medical Office SOP Resource List as a guide, we were specifically interested in identifying Canadian resources where they were available (for example, through the Health Excellence Canada, HQCA, Alberta Health Services, etc), to ensure that the resources we promoted were relevant for end-users. The HQCA began implementing the Patient Safety Culture Survey in primary care clinics, and sharing the PSC resource with clinics in conjunction with their survey results.
Impact
Patient safety, and a culture that promotes patient safety, is an important facet to understand to facilitate a comprehensive view of healthcare quality. The HQCA set out to understand how clinics perform on the domains of patient safety culture through a survey that is administered to staff in the clinic, with results for performance on each domain being shared back to clinic. However, in busy primary care clinics, while there may be intentions to promote a patient safety culture, simply knowing areas that can be improved upon may not be enough to facilitate this kind of action; clinic staff may not have the time or skills to seek out resources for improvement. The impact on W21C’s resource list is that we have removed this onerous step from the clinics, by curating high quality resources for clinics to support them on their patient safety culture journeys.
Services Provided
W21C scanned the available resources in the AHRQ Medical Office SOP Resource List, then consulted with subject matter experts to identify additional resources related to patient safety culture. After assembling potential end-users of the patient safety culture resource for focus groups, we used polling to rank each resource that was identified in terms of applicability and potential useability and finalized a comprehensive resource list based on the end-user feedback. W21C also worked with HQCA on design of the resource.