Hospital SOPS database

Despite the great data and information that are now available as a result of the Hospital SOPS database, one big deficit has been in our understanding of what hospitals are doing between their patient safety culture survey assessments. What initiatives are hospitals implementing How successful are those initiatives in improving patient safety culture and, ultimately, patient safety ... 

Since the first annual comparative database report, published in 2007, which included data voluntarily submitted from 382 US hospitals, the number of hospitals and staff respondents included in the database report has grown each year. The Hospital SOPS 2012 Comparative Database Report displays results from 1,128 hospitals and 567,703 hospital staff respondents (Sorra et al. 2012). This large number of hospitals provides for a much more reliable and comprehensive set of benchmarks. 

Findings fivm the Hospital SOPS 2012 Comparative Database Report... 

Once hospitals use the survey to identify areas for improvement, their next step is to work out what they can do, what actions they can take, to improve patient safety culture. A resource list describing dozens of patient safety initiatives is available to survey users on the AHRQ web site, but hospitals still have to identify what will be effective and which initiatives are likely to be successful in their facilities. For the Hospital SOPS 2011 Comparative Database (Sorra et al. 2008), we asked 456 trending hospitals what types of patient safety initiatives they had implemented between survey assessments. The top five initiatives are shown in Table 12.2. 

Mode of survey administration When the first comparative database report was released in 2007, most hospitals administered paper surveys (56 percent), followed by web (25 percent) and mixed mode (both paper and web -19 percent). By 2012, with rapidly advancing technology, web surveys became the predominant mode (66 percent), followed by paper (21 percent) and mixed mode (13 percent). The one caveat in this trend is that paper surveys still seem to get the highest response rates in US hospitals - on average at least 10 percentage points hi er than other modes. So if response rates are a concern and a hospital has the capabihty and resources to conduct a paper survey, it is still best to administer it by paper. But if costs are an issue, it can often be very eost-effective to administer a web snrvey. User s Guides, available for eaeh of the SOPS surveys on the AHRQ web site (www.ahrq.gov), contain tips and guidance on how best to administer the survey and present results. 

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