Safety skills healthcare

BOX 17.3 Safety skills, behaviours and personal attributes in healthcare Conscientiousness... 

Examining the concepts and principles of patient safety as related to organizational dynamics, culture, system methods, and key patient safety initiatives, the book supplies essential knowledge of healthcare safety risks, challenges, and controls. It includes information on leadership, management, communication skills, and understanding accidents. 

How effectively a person fulfills the safety leader s role—leading the effort to improve his or her organization in all aspects of the Blueprint for Healthcare Safety Excellence—is a function of the leader s skills, knowledge, and abilities, but also, and especially, of the value the leader places on patient safety. And of course, people vary. This is as true for the CEO as for the nurse at the... 

Safety and risk management research in healthcare has adopted as its dominant trend the systems oriented approach, modelled largely on previous research in safely critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power. The systems view entails that the focus is not primarily on the mechanisms of individual human error but on the factors that shape human performance (Rasmussen 1986 Reason 1993,1997). In an organisational context, such factors are, of course, those that are within the control of the organisation. For instance, it has been suggested that quahty and safety are affected not only by operators professional and technical competence and skills, but also by their attitudes to and perceptions of their job roles, their organisation and management (Helmreich and Merritt 1998). Such employee attitudes and views are important elements which shape safety cirlture - and its related notion safety climate . Indeed, survey studies have shown that staff attitudes are important indices of safety performance not only in human-machine system domains such as railway operations and constmction (e.g. Itoh and Andersen 1999 Itoh et al. 2004 Silva et al. 2004) but also in healthcare (e.g. Colla et al. 2005 Itoh and Andersen 2010). 

Healthcare organizations must monitor contractor activities and point out any uncontrolled hazards. Contractors must address and control aU hazards. Some anployers incorrectly assume that contractors who work at heights possess knowledge of OSHA fall protection requirements. Contractor safety can be addressed by a prequaUlication process that allows only contractors with demonstrated skills to bid on projects involving work at heights. 

Simulation-based education (SBE) has been introduced as an efFective method for training healthcare workers [1]. SBE can improve patient safety in healthcare facilities in different ways, particularly if used in individual skills [2]. As a result of the proven efficacy of SBE, there has been an increased number of simulation centers worldwide. These centers have various visions, purposes, and functionahties. Most of them are tailored to deliver education to particular healthcare giver categories or undergraduate trainees, with the end result being better training, reduced medical errors, and thus improved patient safety and quality of care in many medical domains. 

According to a study in the Journal for Healthcare Quality, hospital nursing measures, including staff turnover and workload, are associated with staffs perceptions of a safety culture. Researchers examined the relationship between staff perceptions of a safety culture and nursing-sensitive measures of hospital performance at nine California hospitals and 37 nursing units. The measures of skill mix, staff turnover, and workload intensity accounted for 22 percent to 45 percent of the variance in safety culture perceptions between units. 

Hence, we expect that a successful administrative leader in a large, complex healthcare institution—especially a leader who aspires to improve patient safety—frequently faces the need to bring transformational leadership skills to the fore. Moreover, this administrator may find transformational skills all the more necessary when dealing with the medical staff, whose professional stake—except in the extreme case of malpractice—may lie more in a clinical practice partnership than within the walls of the hospital. 

---