Becker's Hospital Review

52 Executive Briefing: Patient Safety es that require integrated solutions, though, we need new levels of collaboration. Traditional healthcare training does little to identify people with the "collaboration gene" or develop specific teamwork skills. In other industries, collaboration is expected. It is an established be- havioral prerequisite to join an organization and is evaluated as a core performance metric. It's about time hospitals start placing a similar emphasis on this vital trait. Your patients will thank you for it. 5. Engage staff. Front-line staff "own" safety in a manufacturing facility. The solutions need to meet their needs and goals. The same is true in healthcare. For instance, the experience of the operating room team had to be considered for the successful implementation of the surgi- cal checklist. Many times, staff struggle to adopt mandated ap- proaches when they question the organization's performance and patient outcomes or the true intent of their leadership team. If staff can see their leaders committed to patient safety, it is more likely that a new process, such as a surgical checklist, will lead to meaningful change. In other industries, staff engagement is real — everyone is critical to the team and their voices are heard. Too often in healthcare, "engagement" means a survey of staff and superficial program- ming intended to get them to care. What they care about is sim- ple: patient care and patient safety. Staff need to feel that they have a substantial role in achieving both. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Hospital Sur- vey on Patient Safety Culture: 2014 User Comparative Database Report found many hospitals (76 percent) have supervisors who do a good job emphasizing safety and safety improvement. While 76 percent might seem reasonable, given hospital's primary pur- pose, how is it acceptable that any hospital struggles to motivate its supervisors to adequately emphasize safety? 6. Build talent strategies around patient safety goals. Hos- pitals and health systems need to have a clearly defined organi- zational purpose, or a "true north," and improving patient safety should be the heart of this. Hospitals need to specifically define behaviors that support this goal. For example, in the case of the surgical checklist, a flexible leadership style, sense of ownership among staff and teamwork are critical. The best hospitals include behavioral skills like col- laboration in the performance evaluation of everyone on the team, including physicians. Talent acquisition and development is an important part of cre- ating a real safety culture. In top manufacturing or mining com- panies, employees are selected with safety behaviors in mind. Employees are then provided tools and training to further develop these behaviors. Critical thinking, a sense of accountability, atten- tion to detail, conscientiousness and a focus on the patient have been shown to directly impact patient care and safety. Hospitals need to take a deliberate approach to integrating these behavioral competencies, and others, into their talent strategies. Conclusion Certainly, hospitals care about patient safety. It's core to their mis- sion. The challenge is that they may not know what it takes to actually create a "safety culture" like other industries do. Hospi- tals often try to pick and choose specific practices (like check- lists) from other industries that they can adopt to improve patient safety. This doesn't work. If hospitals are serious about reducing harm to patients, they'll invest the time, money and energy into making safety the top pri- ority, every day. This commitment won't be seen as an added task on the to-do list or another program. Spend a few minutes in one of the types of companies we've been discussing and you'll im- mediately see and feel the safety culture. Compare this with the unacceptable number of times that hospital staff fail to wash their hands, follow universal precautions or make other simple errors that harm patients. Those mistakes happen every day in hospitals all around the country. A real safety culture simply wouldn't allow it. n Since its founding in 1993, Select International has been dedicated to developing assessment solutions that help companies identify, select and develop top talent throughout their organization. Select's Healthcare Solutions Group specializes in developing assessment technology to help healthcare orgnaizations improve the return on their most important investment – their people. Hospitals and health systems need a clearly defined organizational purpose, or a "true north," and improving patient safety should be the heart of this.

• Cover