Obstetrical Department Safety Culture Assessment

What is an effective safety culture? It is one in which your physicians, nurses and other staff members do the right thing all the time, even when no one is watching.

Patient safety and quality initiatives are not new, but what is new is the emphasis on using safety and quality outcomes as tools to enhance patient care with a link to reimbursement. It is therefore more important than ever for hospitals and healthcare professionals to assure the right culture of safety exists within their facilities, departments and practices. The first step is understanding the level of your organization or practice’s safety culture which can be provided by an objective, independent evaluator and partner.

Our experienced team of patient safety experts, including Dr. Paul Gluck, past president of the National Patient Safety Foundation, OB-Gyn experts, including Peter A. Schwartz, M.D., past vice president of ACOG, and other healthcare and legal professionals do exactly that – partner with you to enhance your safety culture. The evaluation involves an on-site visit of your facility to evaluate the core components needed to support a true safety culture, including:

• Team work (within and between departments)
• Management expectations and actions on enhancing patient safety
• Continuous quality improvement processes and procedures
• Error analysis processes and procedures
• Staff perception of hospital safety and their role
• Post-adverse event communication
• Enhanced communication and documentation practices
• Staffing
• Hand-offs and Transfer of care
• Organizational response to error
• High-risk clinical safety issues
• Peer review processes
• Patient involvement

The process includes documentation reviews (job descriptions, mission statements, behavioral policies and procedures, staffing orientation process, etc.), touring of the facility and interviews of key personnel. All must be aligned to achieve high-performing safety cultures.

We identify positive practices, weaknesses in the infrastructure of safety and barriers to achieving a true safety culture. This process is essential to the start of a hospital-wide safety initiative; otherwise, you may jump into the safety culture change process, without a true understanding of the needed enhancements, education, policies and procedures, infrastructure and acceptance.