Improving safety culture

The primary reason for, and the added value from audits comes from acting on the information they provide in a timely manner. The actions aim to strengthen the effectiveness of safety instrumented systems, for example, to help minimize the risk of employees or members of the public being injured or killed, contribute to improving safety culture, contribute to prevent any avoidable release of substance into the environment. 

Lean safety The application of both the lean tools and management philosophy to create a continuous improvement safety culture. 

Part of the commitment from the executive leadership team to improve safety culture would be to declare amnesty. This would mean that the playing fields would be leveled and the fault-finding attitude of the past would be set aside. Understanding of the cause and effect of accidental loss will enable line managers to identify all of the accident s causes and not stop the investigation once an unsafe behavior is encountered. Most accidents will have a component where an employee s behavior or actions are questionable, but the focus should now fall on how the system can improve in the future to stop this happening. 

This andit would form the launch platform for further innovation and intervention to improve safety culture. 

Cooper, D. 1998. Improving Safety Culture. Chichester Wiley, p. 205. 

The Health Foundation. 2011. Research Scan Does Improving Safety Culture affect Patient Outcomes November 2011. Available at http //www.health. org.uk/public/cms/75/76/313/3078/Does%20improving%20safety%20 culture%20affect%20outcomes.pdf realName=fsu8Va.pdf (last accessed on 30 April 2014). 

Other methods that have been adapted and appfied to measnre and improve safety culture in healthcare oi nisations include safety walk-rounds and checklists designed to standardise patient care (for example, the World Health Oiganisation Surgical Safety Checklist). 

The description of how safety climate tools, walk-rounds and the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist have been implemented in healthcare has identhied some of the challenges to measuring and improving culture in healthcare teams and organisations. Other important barriers to improving safety culture exist ... 

In summary, currerrt trairring and education create another barrier to improving safety culture because they do not support the development of shared norms and behaviours across different professional groups. Rather they create professional silos. The net effect of the current training approach is that doctors and nurses carmot walk in each other s shoes. Handovers, where multi-disciplinary team input is needed to commimicate safety information across healthcare interfaces, illustrate this issue very well. All too often, nurses seek nursing information and doctors want to hand over a clinical management plan in which key information required by the nurses is not included. 

Following the discussion session, cmrent techniques used in the assessment of safety culture were presented. This was followed by suggestions on how to improve safety culture in participants own organisations. Finally, the workshop closed with an invited speaker describing the safety culture programme in Air Traffic Management run by EUROCONTROL (Meams et al. 2013). 

Workshops provide a valuable source of information for identifying solutions to improve safety culture. 

Paine, L.A., Rosenstein, B.J., Sexton, J.B., Kent, R, Holzmueller, C.G. and Pronovost, P.J. 2011. Assessing and improving safety culture through an academic medical centre A prospective cohort shufy. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 19(6), 547-54. 

There is scarce evidence on the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving safety culture. This lack of evidence is due to the fact that the effectiveness of safety culture interventions is hard to prove because, often, a combination of strategies is observed as having an impact without there being a clear and known relationship between each single intervention and a safety culture improvement... 

Table 14.1 Strategies for improving safety culture concluded)...

Asisiesisiing and Improving Safety Culture Some Key Lessonsi Learned... 

Shorrock, S.T. 2012. Safety culture in your hands Discussion cards for understanding and improving safety culture, lu M. Audersou (ed.). Contemporary Ergonomics and Human Factors 2012. Londou Taylor and Francis, 321-8. 

Annemie Vlayen has a background in rehabilitation sciences and healthcare and hospital management. She is a senior researcher in patient safety at Hasselt University, Belgium. In her PhD research she focused on medical record review, prospective risk analysis and safety culture in hospitals. Her research interests include approaches to improving safety culture, leadership and patient safety education. 

An organization with the simple name The Conference Board provided a strong foundation for those that wanted to learn and improve safety culture. In 2003, the Conference Board released a report entitled Driving Toward 0 - Best Practices in Corporate Safety and Health—How Leading Companies Develop Safety Cultures [3]. 

---