Lead Your Staff: A Culture of Safety: "How Can I Advocate Patient Safety If I Myself Dont Feel Safe?" - the Question That Sounds Rhetorical but Really Isnt

2019 AABB Annual Meeting Session

It is explicitly understood that patient safety is a priority and having policies that advocate patient safety are commonplace in the healthcare setting. However, even when policies and procedures are in place, there is not always an overt awareness of the factors that compromise our abilities to follow them. An understanding of the “culture of safety” (also referred to as “safety culture”), which is reflected in the degree of safety an employee feels in their environment to do the right thing, helps one identify factors in one’s own system that may act as barriers to patient safety. This session is designed to explain to the audience the features of a culture of safety, explain how they determine the successful practice of patient safety actions, and provide tools to the audience members that they can bring back to their own institutions to implement regardless of what policies or procedures may formally be in place. 

Angela R. Skipper, SBB, MLS, BSMT, CLS will define what a culture of safety is and explain its principles, key components, and associated terminologies. Deanna C. Fang, M.D. will outline ways in which a positive and negative culture of safety can lead to achievements and challenges, respectively, for patient safety within transfusion medicine. She will utilize the Audience Response System to demonstrate and discuss examples using questions such as, “Are you more likely to be praised or criticized for reporting an incident?” and “Do you feel that whistleblower/hotline policies are effective in protecting you from retaliation?” Last, Chester Andrzejewski, Ph.D., M.D. will present his institution's experiences in developing various strategies to enhance the recognition, reporting, and mitigation of Transfusion Associated Adverse Events (TAAEs). A primary aim will be to describe the initial and evolving interdisciplinary collaborative efforts by the hospital’s Blood Bank staff with nursing, laboratory, and informatics colleagues focusing on the recognition and mitigation of Transfusion-Associated Circulatory Overload (TACO).

Learning Objectives:

• Explain the need for a culture of safety, especially when advocating for patient safety in the healthcare setting.
• Assess the barriers within one’s own professional environment that can interfere with actualizing patient safety measures, reporting, and improvements.
• Describe examples of strategies that can be utilized in an organization to promote a positive culture of safety.