By Healthcare Facilities Today

Quality patient care hinges just as much on keeping patients safe as much as on treating them correctly and skillfully, according to a blog on the US News & World Report website. Fourteen years after the Institute of Medicine concluded in the headline-generating "To Err is Human" report that mistakes kill as many as 98,000 hospital patients a year, errors are still happening.

 "A promising sign, however, is that more hospitals are conducting internal surveys to determine the extent to which the organizational culture helps or hinders patient safety. Some of these safety-culture surveys are crude and homegrown. Others, however, have been carefully assembled by consensus organizations and are sufficiently robust, given an adequate response rate, to allow analysis at the level of individual units within a hospital, such as the cardiac ICU or the oncology service," wrote blogger Steve Sternberg,

The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) is based on aviation's Flight Management Attitudes Questionnaire. Several of the original questions, such as "Fatigue impairs my work in critical situations" and "When my workload becomes excessive, my performance is impaired," have been retained, according to its developer, J. Bryan Sexton, director of the Duke University Health System Patient Safety Center. 

Another instrument, the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture, is offered for free to hospitals by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Aggregated survey results for 2012 from about 570,000 individuals at more than 1,200 hospitals are displayed online, the blog said.

Such surveys measure aspects of patient safety culture that include caregivers' perception of the institutional support for patient safety, frequency of adverse events, quality of handoffs and transitions, comfort in reporting a potential problem or error, and level of teamwork within hospital units and the organization as a whole.

"Safety culture is an appealing metric for evaluating hospital performance. U.S. News is currently consulting with experts about the possibility of building it into both the Best Hospitals ranking methodology and our pending evaluation of individual hospitals' performance in high-volume conditions and procedures," Sternberg wrote.

Read the blog.