Becoming a High Reliability Organization: Operational Advice for Hospital Leaders

摘要

This document is written for hospital leaders at all levels who are interested in providing patients safer and higher quality care. It does not contain the views of researchers or theorists on how you can do better. Instead, it presents the thoughts, successes, and failures of hospital leaders who have used concepts of high reliability to make patient care better. It is a guidebook for leaders who want to do the same. High reliability concepts are tools that a growing number of hospitals are using to help achieve their safety, quality, and efficiency goals. These concepts are not an improvement methodology like Six Sigma or Lean. Instead, they are insights into how to think about and change the vexing quality and safety issues you face. Hospitals do most things right, much of the time. But even very infrequent failures in critical processes can have terrible consequences for a patient. Creating a culture and processes that radically reduce system failures, and effectively respond when failures do occur is the goal of high reliability thinking.