Announcements

AHRQ releases a new tool to help improve patient safety

The Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture, a new evidence-based tool from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), can help health care providers assess how their staff views different areas of patient safety.  The results can be used to target areas for improvement and build a stronger patient safety culture within the organization. The survey captures opinions from all levels of staff on important dimensions that relate to patient safety and quality issues, communication about error, communication openness, information exchange with other settings, office processes and standardization, organizational learning, staff training, teamwork, and work pressure and pace. It includes survey forms and a user's guide that explains the survey process, discussing such topics as overall project planning, data collection procedures and analysis and report creation.

The free, easy-to-use survey toolkit provides:

• Easy-to-understand survey questions that take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete.
• Ability to gain knowledge of how all staff, from administrators and clerical staff to clinicians, view patient safety culture within the medical office.
• Ability to track changes in patient safety culture over time and evaluate improvement efforts.
• Access to a survey users' group for sharing success stories and implementation strategies.
• Data to compare your office's findings to others.
• Contact information for obtaining free technical assistance related to questions on survey administration, data collection, and analysis.

The new survey is an expansion of AHRQ's Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. It is free and available on AHRQ's Web site at http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/hospculture.

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