Transforming Safety Culture: A Systemwide High Reliability Approach to Preventing Serious Harm in Healthcare

This studied whether High Reliability Organising (HRO) interventions improved serious safety events (SSE), reporting and aligning leadership with frontline practice.

Was a retrospective observational design across 12 hospitals, between 2021-24. Usual limitations & cautions apply with these sorts of designs and measures.

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Extracts:

·        The HRO intervention included leadership development, unified safety reporting, tiered safety huddles, and structured RCA feedback

·        “Hospital SSERs decreased significantly by 71% (P < 0.001 for trend)”

·        “Safety culture composite scores improved in 11 of 13 individual domains, with the largest percentage improvements in scores for leadership support and communication”

·        “A systemwide, unified HRO approach that holistically incorporates HRO-aligned standard work, executive leadership alignment, and proactive systems design can result in lasting preventable harm reductions and cultural transformation”

·        “The overall decline in hospital event reporting likely represents the normalization of reporting behaviors following the initial surge during the 2020 training”

·        “The concurrent increases in clinic reporting validate the effectiveness of targeted ambulatory safety initiatives, demonstrating that contextually specific harm definitions and culture-building efforts successfully enhance transparency in diverse care environments”

·        “Collectively, this suggests that the observed decline in SSEs represents actual safety improvements rather than decreased reporting or detection”

Study link: https://journals.lww.com/ajmqonline/abstract/2026/01000/transforming_safety_culture__a_systemwide_high.5.aspx?context=latestarticles

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