Building an Effective Patient Safety Culture: a Compendium of Best Practices

Building an Effective Patient Safety Culture: A Compendium of Best Practices

At the foundation of successful patient safety and quality improvement efforts is a culture of patient safety within healthcare facilities. A strong safety culture can help minimize medical errors. Strong support from leadership is crucial to truly moving the needle on patient safety and quality across the organization.

Many of us are familiar with the phrase“Culture eats strategy for lunch”. This phrase, originally attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, is increasinglyheard at gatherings of patient safety leaders. Without a strong culture to support it, even the best strategy will fail. The importance of culture in sustaining patient safety improvement efforts is widely recognized, but the question remains—how do we change the culture in healthcare organizations to be more supportive of safety?

The Minnesota Alliance for Patient Safety (MAPS) believes it has found an answer to this question. Using known best practices and emerging national standards in the road map framework that has proven successful in Minnesota, the MAPS safety culture road map helps organizations build an effective organizational culture devoted to patient safety and quality.

MAPSinitiated this work by bringing togetherpatient safety experts from across the statein 2009. The work of this group evolved, local experts were consulted, best practices were identified in the literature, and tools and resources were gathered to help organizations implement the identified best practices. This work was organized into eight key culture domains:

• Getting Started – includes best practices around assessment & analysis, plan development, measurement and education;
• Leadership – a critical element in advancing a culture of safety, all organizations must get buy-in and support before proceeding to the remaining domains;
• Communication – includes strategies and tactics to improve the exchange of clinical information;
• Justice –includes resources to ensure that staff behaviors are fairly evaluated and that organizations are accountable for safe system design while individuals are accountable for their behaviors;
• Teamwork – draws on a large body of research available through the Agency for Health Quality and Research, that developed the TeamSTEPPS model for improving teamwork;
• Learning – includes strategies and tactics to help organizations gather data and information that can be used to learn and improve;
• Patient/Resident Engagement – includes strategies for engaging patients/residents and families, gathering input from them and conducting effective disclosure when an error does occur and;
• Sustaining the Work – provides tools designed to help with measurement, analysis, dissemination of findings, evaluation of performance and more.

Evidence shows that organizations successful in moving toward a culture supportive of safety improvement have implemented change in many, if not all of these domains.

MAPS is currently working in partnership with the Minnesota Hospital Association, MDH and Stratis Health to help hospitals, clinics and long term care organizations implement various components of the Safety Culture Road Map. The goal is to guide organizations through the work in a number of the domains so that they can achieve a change in their culture and more sustainable patient safety improvements. More than 50 hospitals are participating in the organizational culture work and are completing their assessment of the road map best practices in their organizations and working to close any gaps. A new long-term care work group has been formed and will help spread the best practices for a safety culture to this setting during 2013.

More information about the MAPS Safety Culture Road Map can be found at