What the Culture of Patient Safety survey revealed

As you may recall, all Asante employees recently were invited to take Asante’s Culture of Patient Safety survey. The surveys — one for hospitals and another for medical offices — are designed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to help organizations learn where they’re strong on safety and in what areas they can improve.

These surveys are an important part of maintaining our reputation as a top health system. Organizations with strong cultures of safety have lower infection rates, fewer readmissions, better surgical outcomes, fewer adverse events and lower mortality.

Results of this year’s hospital survey found that Asante hospitals meet or exceed national norms for perception of patient safety. (This is a new version of the hospital survey, so we don’t have a direct comparison to prior years’ surveys.)

Our strengths include teamwork and response to errors. Employees work well together, are treated fairly when they make mistakes, and our staff and leaders emphasize learning from those mistakes.

We have opportunities to improve our communication about errors, as well as our reporting of patient safety events, particularly the “near-misses,” or, events that have the potential to cause patient harm.

In the medical office survey, APP saw dramatic improvements from a 2018 survey in nearly all categories, including a 47% rise in the overall perception of safety and quality. It also saw positive results in communication openness and patient care follow-up and tracking.

When compared to the national norm, APP has opportunities for improvement in most areas, including organizational learning, and office processes and standardization.

A strong culture of safety does more than protect our patients and help us deliver great care, it is also associated with employee well-being, greater job satisfaction and less burnout.

We greatly appreciate you taking the time to complete the survey. We value your input and will use the results of the survey, along with those from the upcoming Employee Voice survey, to develop sustainable actions to help improve patient safety and overall culture.

We will continue work on organizational initiatives including our Resiliency Program, Workplace Violence Prevention and Just Culture to support our employees and foster a culture of excellence.