Promoting Safety through Well-Being: An Experience in Healthcare

Practitioners’ well-being and clinical risk management are two interrelated concepts in healthcare. Patient safety, workers’ safety and practitioners well-being have often been managed and measured with different methods, even though they are tightly linked. In this paper we propose a method that is suitable to increase organizational health. The action-research project aims to increase the commitment of healthcare managers and practitioners toward the development of an organizational culture which is oriented to patient and practitioner safety and well-being. These are crucial organizational resource for an effective process management. The project lasted 18 months and involved 60 nurses and physicians working in the operating room of six hospitals in the North of Italy. The project aimed to develop an inter-organizational methodology for noticing and monitoring critical threats to safety and well-being. The tool consisted of a report form in which practitioners could describe possible threats, solutions and personal contributions to the solutions. The participants designed it according to their practice and it was considered suitable and usable in their current work activities. Its added value is to overcome the habitual bottleneck between anomalies investigation and action planning, by identifying a specific role in the learning process to take care of the transition from data gathering to data use. The tool aims to enable individuals and teams to monitor and share ideas about critical aspects that affect their safety and well-being, collect contributions to solve them, sustain dissemination of good practices and frame health promotion as a crucial organizational resource.