Culture of Safety

Building a culture of safety.

In May of 2023, SPS introduced proactive safety to the culture portfolio and has developed playbooks to support the implementation of proactive safety tools into existing work. Proactive safety focuses on creating safer, more resilient systems by learning from normal work on the frontline and developing system enhancements that make it easier and safer for the frontline staff to do their jobs. Rather than learning only from what goes wrong, proactive safety supports learning from successes and challenges before an incident occurs. Proactive safety combines various safety theories and concepts (such as safety II, human-centered design, human factors engineering, organizational psychology, resilience engineering, etc.) and is a natural progression in our journey toward high reliability.

SPS has made significant progress since its formation utilizing the traditional safety approach that leans heavily on standardization, event detection, and review; however, we have an opportunity to broaden our impact by introducing this evolved approach. In many measures, we see plateaus in outcomes and bundle reliability. Incremental increases in bundle compliance are unlikely to result in dramatic improvements, prompting the need to expand our approach to learning from all operations (normal work) to support breakthrough improvements. Proactive safety seeks to work “beyond the bundle” to build adaptative capacity in healthcare systems and enhance our ability to function safely in complex and ever-changing conditions.

For Network members only

  • Cause Analysis training include, the SSE Definition, Classification & Self-Assessment Training Webinar; Disclosure Training Webinar; Just Culture Training Webinar; and the Root Cause Analysis Training; Apparent Cause Analysis Training Webinar, and Coding Individual & System Failures & Conducting a Common Cause Analysis Training Webinar.

  • Error Prevention training includes the Error Prevention Training and the Safety Coach Program Training Webinar.

  • Leadership Methods training includes the Leadership Methods Training.

  • We encourage our hospitals to have safety committees and other governance structures in place.