Culture of Safety (Austria)
Austria and our Ministry of Health and Women are working on a culture of safety in healthcare - a theme which has already become a top priority in many European national healthcare systems.
Adverse events and medical errors are common in medicine and they can involve patients, tasks, individual staff members, teams, the working environment, organization and management and institutions. Errors can occur in all aspects of medical work and can be approached with a person-centered- or with a system view. The system view acknowledges that humans are fallible, errors are expected, and focus on factors and conditions that influence error.
The Austrian approach to Patient Safety should focus both on the situation of the patient as well as the difficult situation of the health worker after an adverse effect. Both of them require support from the health care system!
A culture of learning program involves internal and external perspectives; therefore an atmosphere of trust is essen-
tial. Cultural learning from error situations must tolerate, respect and deal with conflicting views and values. This allows us to analyse not only medical decisions but also ethical decisions as a source of systemic error and as a resource for increasing patient safety. The new culture is based on continual awareness of this in hospitals and requires strong commitment and support in the form of a training program. Safety culture should also involve and empower people before they become patients. It also involves insurance companies, politicians and academic experts and requires the introduction of a national anonymous reporting system.
Institutions need to create an environment where workers feel safe about reporting errors.
Author: Dr.Maria Woschitz-Merkač, Federal Ministry of Health and Women, Dep. IV/3, Vienna/Austria (e-mail: Maria.Woschitz-Merkac@bmgf.gv.at).
