Key to safety: Creating the right work culture
Key to safety: Creating the right work culture
Hospital works to change behavior
Are your employees too busy to be safe? Too stuck in their old way of doing things to use new safety equipment?
There's much more to implementing a new safety program, such as safe patient handling, than buying equipment. That's why some hospitals have focused on behavioral management and building a "culture of safety" as the key to improving overall safety.
At Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, IN, CEO Phil Newbold, FACHE, has put safety "at the top of the agenda" at meetings of the hospital's board and senior management and hired Behavioral Science Technology (BST) of Ojai, CA, to help the staff build behaviors that are important to safety.
"If our employees don't feel the management supports the culture of safety for them, then that's a signal that we want it for patients but we don't want the same level of safety for our staff members," Newbold says. "It's pretty hard to separate those two. If they see how interested leadership is in their personal well-being, that will carry over to everything they do for patients and families and visitors."
It takes about five to seven years to change the culture of an institution, says Newbold. But it's the ongoing commitment that will convince employees, he says. "You do it one person at a time by building trust...by doing what you say you're going to do," he says.
That may mean including safety practices and principles in employee competencies and new employee orientation, as well as demonstration from leadership that safety is important, he says.
Taking a broader look at safety led Memorial to its Safe Moves Initiative, which integrates patient fall prevention and safe patient handling. In the first year of the program, musculoskeletal injuries declined by 37%. Patient falls also have fallen below the benchmark of 4 per 1,000 patient days.
Separating patient safety and employee safety, as many hospitals do, simply doesn't make any sense, says John Hidley, MD, a psychiatrist who co-founded Behavioral Science Technology. "We find it curious that the health care industry makes a distinction between employee safety and patient safety," he says. "The interventions that work for one work for another."
To build a "culture of safety," Memorial began by defining a safe hospital environment. "We've worked with senior leadership to help them define what they envision that safety ought to be – including employee safety and patient safety," says Sharon Dunn, RN, BSN, MAS, practice leader for health care at BST.
BST surveyed employees, including physicians, and began identifying gaps between the safety goals and the realities. For example, BST wants to know how employees perceive leadership's credibility.
"You're trying to create an environment in which the employee feels the leader has his interests at heart and therefore the employee is willing to have the interests of the facility at heart," says Hidley.
Newbold set his goal high. "We hope to be the safest hospital in the United States," he says.
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