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Most health professionals report errors reluctantly, fearing a punitive hospital culture, according to a recent Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) report. Out of the more than half a million survey respondents from 1,128 hospitals, nearly half of the staff said that they feel their mistakes and event reports are being held against them. Nearly two-thirds said they think their mistakes are kept in their personnel file, and 54 % said when an adverse event is reported, "it feels like the person is being written up, not the problem."
"You could see how the traditional approach--an event is reported and someone is written up--has a hall monitor in elementary school feeling to it," said patient safety advocate and hospitalist leader Bob Wachter, chief of the medical service at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. "It's extraordinarily destructive in a patient safety context." Coupled with the fact that 86 percent of hospital workers don't report patient harm events, the AHRQ survey may prove to be disappointing news to patient safety advocates who have championed transparency and a blame-free hospital culture Read the full article.
