Track the Right Safety Indicators for Best Results
Risk managers can track leading indicators to assess safety improvement efforts, but there is no uniform set of leading indicators for hospitals and health systems. Knowing which indicators to track can make your risk management program more effective.
A leading indicator is a proactive, preventive, and predictive measure, says Joy Inouye, a Chicago-based writer with Wolters Kluwer Enablon, which provides software solutions and other consulting for healthcare providers. Previously, Inouye researched best practices in occupational safety and health for the National Safety Council.
“It’s an indicator of where and when an incident might happen,” Inouye says. “That’s why it’s so important in risk management — leading indicators drive the identification and control of risks in a workplace setting so that workers and managers know what can cause injuries.”
There is no suite of leading indicators that fits all organizations, but there are ways to determine what is best for a hospital or health system. First, Inouye recommends identifying the top hazards within the organization. For example, that might include workers sustaining injuries when performing unassisted patient lifts. One reason for the injury might be the lift team taking too long to respond, prompting the worker to perform the lift alone. In that case, risk management might need to track lift team response times as a leading indicator. As the response time declines, risk managers should see the number of unassisted lift injuries decline.
Inouye cautions there can be a tendency to mostly track patient safety issues and not employee safety. “This is something we see across the board in all industries. The focus should be on the worker also — not just patients, consumers, or customers,” she says. “In healthcare, of course there is a strong focus on the patient and patient safety, but an organization’s leading safety indicators should also take into account the health and safety of its employees.”
A common mistake is taking too long to determine which safety indicators to track, Inouye says. Worries over choosing the perfect set of indicators can delay tracking so long that opportunities to improve safety are lost. The choice of indicators can be changed at any time, so Inouye cautions against waiting for the perfect set.
Tracking an indicator does not always mean creating a new method of data collection and analysis. Risk managers might already be tracking an indicator in some form for another purpose.
“Sometimes, a great leading indicator is right in front of you. You may be tracking employee attendance at safety meetings, but you’re not actually doing anything with that information,” Inouye says. “You can monitor employee attendance at safety meetings and set a goal of something like 97%. Then, you can correlate this leading indicator against other metrics to see if that actually lowers your injury and incident rates.”
It is key to act on the information gleaned from leading safety indicators. Simply seeing a correlation is not enough.
“You have to integrate what you have learned into your health and safety system. Otherwise, you’re just engaging in data collection without any real goal or intent,” Inouye says. “If you don’t have evidence that your leading indicators are having any real effect on your lagging indicators, you should rethink what indicators you’re tracking or how you’re tracking them. The whole point of this is to have a continuous improvement system.”
SOURCE
- Joy Inouye, Writer, Wolters Kluwer Enablon, Chicago. Email: [email protected].
Risk managers can track leading indicators to assess safety improvement efforts, but there is no uniform set of leading indicators for hospitals and health systems. Knowing which indicators to track can make your risk management program more effective.
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