Improving safety in hospitals and healthcare systems through error elimination concepts is only half of the equation to patient safety, co-authors Jenna Merandi, PharmD, and Thomas Bartman, MD, PhD, write in an op-ed published in STAT.
Here are the four things you need to know:
1. Ms. Merandi, medication safety officer of Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Children's Hospital, and Dr. Bartman, associate medical director of quality improvement at Nationwide Children's, have improved their philosophy to behavioral systems through the development of Safety II. While Safety I involves learning from past errors, Safety II focuses on learning from what went right when staff successfully prevented errors in the past.
2. Safety II recognizes the possibility that some medical errors have not arisen before, meaning Safety I's approach is less effective. It also acknowledges that healthcare systems have significantly more variables than just patients and hospital staff.
3. Where Safety I sees humans as potential liability, Safety II recognizes that humans can add value by being proactive in figuring out what might go wrong and coming up with innovative solutions.
4. The implications of Safety II are wide-ranging. In addition to the old "finding and fixing" model of addressing errors, hospital staff now have the potential to reduce — or even eliminate — preventable harm to patients by combining Safety I and Safety II efforts, they write.
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