The National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) Call to Action (download report), released in October 2012, calls for the elimination of preventable harm. While recognizing that a strong and just safety culture is a key element for improvement, NAHQ acknowledges healthcare providers still fear reporting of adverse events and a continued deficit due to a lack of a protective infrastructure to safeguard responsible and accurate reporting of quality and safety outcomes and concerns. Accelerating financial models based upon quality and safety outcome raise the stakes associated with quality and safety outcomes and further reinforces the need for an infrastructure that encourages accurate reporting.
The NAHQ calls for “leaders to implement protective structures to assure accountability for integrity in quality and safety evaluation and comprehensive, transparent, accurate data collection, and reporting to internal and external oversight bodies”. Actionable items contained in the call to action include: “establish accountability for the integrity of safety systems, protect those who report concerns, report data accurately and respond to concerns with robust improvement”.
Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs), like the Center for Patient Safety, support each actionable items – a source of learning about safety systems, providing federal-based legal and confidentiality protections for reporters, collecting detailed data using common data formats established by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and serving as conveners across large numbers of providers to learn, share the learning and support broad-based improvement efforts.