No Harm in Learning

The project investigates the High Reliability Organisation (HRO) status of three National Health Service (NHS) Trusts  in the UK to reveal the HRO strengths and weaknesses of the organisations in terms of patient safety culture. Using survey data, we have built a maturity grid for each institution to assess the alignment of the safety culture and the safety climate for each of the 5 HRO principles/dimensions. We can measure the difference between what an organisation thinks its safety culture is (e.g., patient safety priorities, plans) and what is happening at the point of care i.e., the climate, which may differ significantly from organisational aspirations.  In addition, the maturity grid enables us to explore the development of a quality improvement roadmap for each site to facilitate improvement of the HRO status and therefore safety culture.