Lifeline: Categorizing Your Patient Safety Events—Rethinking Severity and Impact

Program Date/Time: Wednesday, January 29 at 1 p.m. ET / 12 p.m. CT

“So how bad was it?” This is typically the first question that gets asked when we start dealing with a patient safety event or error. The answer to that question guides our future approach as we move to actions that improve our ability to provide safe care. Often, we use a “Severity Scale” to help us communicate “how bad something was.”

In this session, Ken Rohde, President of KRRohde LLC, will discuss the evolution of the severity scales and provide tips on how to make them work.

Learning Objectives:

• Where did the severity scales come from? Which one should we use?
• The importance of the severity matrix.
• Why we need to be thinking about more than severity.
• The concept of Total Impact of an event.
• How we can apply Total Impact in our organizations approach to prioritizing patient safety events
  • Estimating Total Impact
  • Using Total Impact in our patient safety analysis
  • Extra credit: A probabilistic approach
• Next steps