The National Patient Safety Foundation released guidelines developed to help healthcare organizations improve the way they investigate medical errors, adverse events and near misses, according to a press release.
Here are four things to know:
1. Root cause analysis is a common process among health professionals to learn how and why errors occurred, but the NPSF believes there have been inconsistencies in the success of these initiatives.
2. NPSF, with a grant from The Doctors Company Foundation, convened a panel of experts and stakeholders to examine best practices around RCAs and developed new standardized guidelines.
3. James P. Bagian, MD, PE, director of the Center for Health Engineering and Patient Safety at the University of Michigan, served as co-chair of the panel along with Doug Bonacum, CSP, CPPS, vice president, Quality, Safety, and Resource Management at Kaiser Permanente.
4. The RCA process was renamed RCA2, with an emphasis on taking sustainable, systems-based action to improve safety of care.
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