The year-long effort will focus on safety for healthcare providers, as well as the patients they serve.
The American Nurses Association will spend 2016 promoting its new "Culture of Safety" campaign to champion improved safety for patients and healthcare providers.
Pam Cipriano |
But "there's still enormous room for improvement in safety," she says. "Not all organizations have really adopted the best practices."
Organizations should move beyond the "old approach" of safety that revolves around chasing numbers on a scorecard.
"The new approach is that safety has to be a way of life," Cipriano says. Moreover, it has to trump all other goals, because when an organization has a true culture of safely, "all of the other improvements follow.
"We really need to emphasize that learning within healthcare," she says. "It's sort of a clarion call across all organizations that it's really time to live this set of activities and values."
Cipriano says that the campaign aims to make sure organizations and their leaders—as well as employees—are not only adopting a culture of safety but actually demonstrating one.
"It starts from the belief that leaders absolutely have to set the stage," she says. "For a long time everyone has known what to do but it's really putting it into practice. That's the harder part."
For instance, leaders need to ensure that resources are in place to achieve results, including resources for adequate staffing, equipment, and education. Cipriano also says leaders should adopt and support "a sense of yearning for constant improvement" and allow behaviors to define metrics.
"The staff need to know that if they speak up something will happen," she says, and leaders must respond with transparency, accountability, and actual results.
Leaders must demonstrate that they are receptive to the staff and encourage the reporting of errors and near misses, with assurances that the will be no blame, finger-pointing, or risk of punishment.
"There has to be an acknowledgement that there is no hierarchy," Cipriano says. "Safety doesn't require a hierarchy. It requires empowering every voice."
The campaign will also focus on and tie together issues such as safe staffing levels and skill mix; violence in the workplace; stopping manual patient handling and lifting; and making sure that technology is user friendly and is used appropriately, including EHRs. The health and safety of nurses themselves will also feature in the campaign's efforts, including making sure that nurses get adequate breaks and have a have a quiet area to stop, rest, and eat.
"Nurses tell us that stress is probably the most prominent feature of a work environment," Cipriano says.
With this is mind, ANA is supporting the "quadruple aim," adding the health of the provider to the much-discussed "triple aim" of better care, better health, and lower costs.
ANA says that through the campaign, organizations can access a "culture of safety" logo and toolkit, which includes a:
- Fact sheet
- Email template
- Social media graphics, draft tweets and Facebook posts
- Customizable news release
- PowerPoint template
- Culture of safety theme for 2016 National Nurses Week (May 6-12), with accompanying toolkit
- Thematic articles throughout the year in ANA periodicals American Nurse Today and The American Nurse
- Monthly Navigate Nursing webinars and two four-part webinar series related to the culture of safety theme
Cipriano says the culture of safety efforts will resemble its approach to 2015's year of ethics campaign, in that it will cluster content and messaging, providing a deep dive on the topic and its resources. And the year-long emphasis underscores the importance of repeating a message again and again to emphasize its significance and how it should be implemented.
"You can't just say something once," says Cipriano, and you have to tie it all together. "We believe that culture of safety is worthy of that kind of attention."
It also places nurses at the forefront of making this kind of change.
"We are expecting them to speak out loudly and often," Cipriano says. "And we want them to be full partners, not just with physicians but with healthcare executives and any leader that is in the space of delivering care."
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
