Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives (Sep 2020)

Interventions to improve resident reporting of patient safety events: a quality improvement initiative

  • Mukul Singal,
  • Manasi Godbole,
  • Aneeqa Zafar,
  • Nagesh Jadhav,
  • Richard Alweis,
  • Hiloni Bhavsar

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/20009666.2020.1799494
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 5
pp. 431 – 435

Abstract

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Background Patient safety events (PSE) are opportunities to improve patient care but physicians rarely report them. In a previous study, residents identified knowledge regarding what constitutes a PSE, perceived lack of time, complexity of the reporting process, lack of feedback, and perceived failure to resolve the issue despite reporting to be barriers limiting their PSE reporting. The residency programs and system patient safety and quality improvement departments created targeted interventions to address identified barriers. Objective Assess effectiveness of targeted interventions on improving PSE reporting rates amongst residents. Methods As part of a multi-residency patient safety project, interventions were created to focus on the removal of barriers to reporting PSE identified previously. Post-interventions, an identical cross-sectional survey of the residents at the same two community teaching hospitals was conducted from Sept to Dec 2018 through an online questionnaire tool. Results 78 out of 149 residents (52.3%) completed the survey. We found a significant improvement in the number of residents who endorsed reporting a PSE in the past 1 year (51.2% vs 23.5%, p = 0.001), as well as during the course of their training (52.6% vs 26.5%, P = 0.001). There was also a significant decrease in the number of residents who were unsure of how to report a PSE (p = 0.031) as well as those who viewed medical error as a sign of incompetence (p = 0.036). Conclusion Our study demonstrates that simplifying the PSE reporting process, improving knowledge and acceptance of patient safety/quality improvement principles and promotion of a just culture improves resident PSE reporting.

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