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Website spotlight: Nurses find simple ways to improve satisfaction

Nurse Leader Weekly, June 14, 2010

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Staff members are often trained to report a potential medical error or near-miss event. However, more often than not, these events go unreported. In 2003, The University of Texas (UT) System, made up of six health institutions, developed a system that allowed the anonymous reporting of close calls, near misses, and potential errors.

Despite the reports’ anonymity, only 175 events were reported during the first two-and-a-half years of the program.

After seeing this result, Robert L. Massey, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, director of clinical nursing at UT’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and a former colleague wanted to know why the program was not working and how they could encourage staff to report medical errors.

In 2005, Massey and his former colleague proposed and implemented a pilot test of the Good Catch program at M. D. Anderson. By putting a positive spin on the reports (emphasizing that increased reporting of near misses helps the hospital learn how to prevent future errors) and developing a competition to encourage reporting, M. D. Anderson received 2,744 reports of potential errors during the initial six months of the pilot program.

Editor’s note: To read the rest of this article, visit “Nurses find simple ways to improve satisfaction”  found in the Reading Room at www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com.

Do you need continuing education (CE) credits? Check out this month’s CE article about patient safety and Good Catch reporting or visit our archives and view a compilation of CE articles (marked with an asterisk)

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