4 ways to improve healthcare error reporting and save lives

4 strategies to improve error reporting and reduce patient harm

Healthcare leaders seeking to implement an honest culture and ensure staff feel comfortable reporting errors or mistakes should employ these four strategies.

1. Make reporting easy

Healthcare employees are busy. It takes time to stop what you’re doing and make a report—even with the most state-of-the-art incident reporting system in place. While several software options can ease this burden, organisation leaders should also consider implementing other ways to make a report—via text, 24/7 hotline, or email.

2. Increase risk awareness

Often, errors aren’t reported because no harm to the patient occurred—so employees’ perception of risk is relatively low. But just because a patient wasn’t harmed in that instance doesn’t mean the non-negative outcome will be the same if the mistake is repeated.

3. Give people feedback

When someone takes the time to report a safety incident, we need to follow up with a thank-you message and information on how the event is being handled—as well as the results. This should be done even if there wasn’t a problem with the reported situation. In every situation, we must thank employees for speaking up for safety.

4. Offer support

If an individual self-reports an error or mistake, they need support from leadership and colleagues. The majority of physicians, nurses, and other clinicians entered this field because of a desire to help other people—and causing unintentional harm can be devastating.

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Insync partners with Press Ganey to help healthcare organisations transform their patient experience and reduce patient harm. Our Patient Experience solutions gather comprehensive patient feedback to understand preferences, prioritise opportunities to reduce suffering, and turn insights into action with best practices and expert support. Learn more here.