Safety Culture Assessment

The diagnostic assessment remains the foundation of the entire performance culture initiative. It provides HPI with an in-depth understanding of the target healthcare organization and ensures the selection of best-fit human performance improvement strategies. The diagnostic serves an equally important role of unifying the organization’s leadership in its own understanding of the strengths and weakness of the existing culture and of the human performance factors associated with current performance issues.

There are three components of the diagnostic activity – a safety culture assessment, a common cause analysis of past events of harm and an evaluation of strengths and opportunities relative to current organizational performance.

Common Cause Analysis - Common cause analysis is an aggregating examination of any sentinel or other serious events that have occurred in an organization in the past. Data from the root cause analyses (RCA’s) already conducted of these events is captured in a multi-dimensional Pareto analysis to identify any system problems leading to events. Key inappropriate acts from past RCA’s are categorized in various dimensions (e.g. professional group involved, department involved, work process, key activity being performed, type of human error, human error and system failure mode). The goal of this component is to identify any common causes that have contributed to these known events so that these causes can be targeted early in the intervention plan. The results are also used to select the appropriate behavior-based expectations for each facility.

Safety Governance Index™ - Based on document reviews and group interviews with staff, leaders, and physicians, the healthcare organization is evaluated against 40 critical success factors required for effective performance, called the Safety Governance Index™. This analysis serves to identify organizational strengths and weaknesses in the areas of strategic leadership, operational systems, operational leadership, individual practice habits, and performance improvement systems. The results also are used to cross-validate findings of the of the common cause analysis.

Safety Culture - There are several safety culture survey tools (see Resources page) that can fulfill the purpose of understanding the organization’s current safety culture strengths and weaknesses. Since culture drives behavior and behavior drives outcomes, this information can be used in strategic planning efforts to improve the probability of future performance.