Paper
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Creating a Culture of Safety: Communication in Healthcare
Lydia L. Forsythe, MSN, MA, PhD, Surgical Services, St. Anthony Medical Center OSF Healthcare, Rockford, IL, USA
| Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to discuss communication in healthcare between team members. |
| Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to understand the relationships that contribute to a culture of safety. |
Abstract
Lydia Forsythe: November 17, 2006
Over 4000 wrong-site surgeries occur each year within the United States, and the number is rising. In an attempt to reduce that number, healthcare professionals are trying to establish a “Culture of Safety” in which operating room communication is clear, precise, and has a sense of conjoint meaning-making among team participants.
This study described communication patterns among team members in an operating room in an acute care medical center. The participants included nurses, physicians, technologists, and non-clinical personnel. Drawing on ideas of critical, micro and traditional ethnography and narrative interviewing, the data were analyzed both by thematic coding and using some of the heuristics from the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM).
The themes revealed that to develop a culture of safety, the healthcare environment and team relationships needs to be free of intimidation and avoidance, where communication flows openly and that all of the voices on the team need to be heard in an atmosphere of equality. Most important in the creation of a culture of safety, is that patients should always be the prime focus of all team members.
The findings suggest that to develop a culture of safety, professionals in healthcare need to increase their abilities to partner, trust each other as a care deliver team, treat each other with respect, and to development collaborative meaning making in an effort to deliver safe patient care.