The vision for healthcare is to build a high reliability organization to solve quality and safety issues and avoid harm. Instituting a safety culture is the first step toward achieving this big, hairy, audacious goal. It is essential to build trust through fair and consistent practices in reviewing events and supporting a reporting culture.
Employees must know that confidentiality will be maintained, and their reports will be acted upon, or they will decide it is not worthwhile to report problems. It is imperative that workers report minor incidents and near misses to warn of impending dangers in the system and address them.
Organizations must be transparent with workers about safety information so that they know what safety issues are present and they can participate in their solution.
Leaders must set the stage for safety culture and model the behavior consistently every day or it will eat safety for lunch…really!
Adapted from: Quezada (July 18, 2016) Introduction to “Just Culture”. ATS Incident Analysis Workshop. FAA Air Traffic Organization
In a positive safety culture, success looks like this:
For further information on Safety Culture and High Reliability, visit:
If you are struggling with a concept or terminology in the course, you may contact RiskManagementSupport@capella.edu for assistance.
If you are having technical issues, please contact learningcoach@sophia.org.
