GAO Report Highlights Three Key Patient Safety Challenges

 

Agency finds that hospitals struggle with data collection, identifying evidence-based practices, and implementation strategies.

A recent report from a federal watchdog agency offers new insight into the barriers hospitals still face when it comes to addressing patient safety concerns, offering a concise distillation of the key gaps that remain in ongoing efforts to prevent patient harm.

Officials at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) interviewed patient safety experts at six hospitals and six insurers, as well as officials at CMS and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The six hospitals were selected according to their performance in certain patient safety quality measures. Based on their collective input, the GAO identified three common challenges hospitals face concerning patient safety:

• Obtaining data to identify adverse events
• Determining which patient safety practices should be implemented
• Ensuring staff consistently implement best practices over time

Although the GAO noted that the findings were not generalizable, experts at national patient safety organizations indicated that the issues identified in the report closely aligned with the challenged most hospitals and patient safety officers still face today.

“I do think the challenges they identify are pretty important and pretty pervasive,” says Saul Weingart, MD, MPP, PhD, chief medical officer at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and a member of the National Patient Safety Foundation’s board of directors.

Based on interviews with patient safety experts, the GAO also identified areas in which more resources and better information could assist hospitals with patient safety implementation:

• The impact of contextual factors on the implementation of best practices in different hospitals
• Detailed experiences and strategies used by hospitals that have successfully implemented best practices
• Improved techniques for measuring the frequency of adverse events

Weingart says the report touches on the important and evolving concept of implementation science, which has still not been fully explored in healthcare. Many of the struggles that hospitals encounter during patient safety improvement initiatives can be traced back to the fact that putting policy into practice is often easier said that done.

This is an excerpt from the May issue of Patient Safety Monitor. Subscribers can read the rest of the article here. Non-subscribers can find out more about the journal, its benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.