“The fair treatment of staff supports a culture of fairness, openness and learning in the NHS by making staff feel confident to speak up when things go wrong, rather than fearing blame.” NHS Improvement, 2018
A ‘just’ culture has an important role to play in the management of patient safety incidents.
Organisations with a ‘just’ culture:
One common response to patient safety incidents within the NHS is to find the people who made the errors and to punish or re-train them. Although this might seem to solve the problem, this response does not actually help to make care safer for patients. This is because adverse events are rarely the fault of an individual, but instead the fault of groups of people working within a faulty system.
A large survey of healthcare professionals in America – the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality safety culture survey – found that over a quarter of respondents said that whenever pressure builds up, managers want staff to work faster, even if it means taking shortcuts. Half of the healthcare professionals surveyed said they work in crisis mode, trying to do too much, too quickly, and over a third reported that safety is sacrificed to get more done. This situation is all too familiar in the UK too.
This pressure to get more done in less time can lead to errors or workarounds, and some of these errors or workarounds may result in harm to a patient – an adverse event or even a death. If staff are being encouraged to work unsafely then we might ask whether it is unjust to punish them when things go wrong. Organisations with a ‘just culture’ recognise this.
”"We need to recognise that when things go wrong, it’s not usually because people have made a deliberate mistake and therefore we actually need to support them … how can we make the right thing the easy thing to do?"
Although incidents are rarely down to one individual’s behaviour, there are still instances where staff have behaved recklessly, or deliberately deviated from protocols that the majority of others adhere to. In this case, they should, of course, be held to account for their behaviour, but such instances are rare. NHS Improvement have produced a ‘just culture guide’ to help managers decide on culpability in patient safety incidents. They advocate questions probing five key areas:
Deliberate harm – was there any intention to cause harm?
Health – are there indications of substance abuse, physical ill health or mental ill health?
Foresight – did the individual depart from a routinely used protocol?
Substitution – did the individual behave as a peer might have done?
Mitigating circumstances – were there any significant mitigating circumstances?
For further information, see the reference below.
There is evidence that where an unjust culture operates, staff respond by choosing not to report safety incidents for fear of retribution. In contrast, organisations with a ‘just’ culture respond to incidents by understanding them and learning the lessons, and these are the organisations where staff are least likely to suffer if they make a mistake. Sadly, this response remains far too rarely seen. We conducted a survey of over one thousand UK doctors, and they told us that reporting an adverse event resulted in local improvements less than a quarter of the time, and in systems changes less than a fifth of the time.
Having a ‘just’ culture is about more than response to incidents. For example, when teams receive feedback about actions taken as a result of leadership walk-rounds, this can impact positively on staff wellbeing and safety culture (Sexton et al., 2017).
More generally still, Michael West (2016) argues that NHS leaders ‘should be promoting the idea that humans can flourish in the workplace, by ensuring that staff have opportunities for growth and development, the experience of supportive relationships at work, work environments that promote their physical health, and leaders who provide the resources that enable them to cope effectively with the demands of their work’.
References
Creating a workplace where NHS staff can flourish – The King’s fund
”"I think we need to be clearer about what we’re intending to do when we declare errors. That’s different from reporting a violation, where somebody’s deliberately done something wrong; but at the moment they’re almost treated in similar fashion."
Many organisations want to improve the support they offer their staff after they have been involved in a patient safety incident, and are looking at ways to achieve this. These two case studies give examples of support systems established in the UK.
Who?
The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust in partnership with the East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative and academics from the University of Leicester and Cardiff University
What?
Tier 1: basic emotional first aid at a departmental level
Provision of training on basic supportive leadership and human factors for clinical areas.
Tier 2: access to specially trained peer supporters
Peer and self-nominated multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals recruited from within the Trust using a selection process.
Training for peer supporters based on a one day workshop covering the concept of the second victim, organisational culture and the role of the peer supporter, with regular refresher sessions available.
The peer supporter provides 1:1 crisis intervention, support, mentoring and debriefing.
Ongoing support for the peer supporters is ensured through regular sessions for them to meet with the Trust’s internal counselling service to discuss progress or any particular concerns.
Tier 3: fast-track referral to professional counsellors
A referral network to provide further psychological and structural support for peer supporters through the trust’s internal counselling service.
Does it help?
Qualitative interviews were used to evaluate the service. Those using the service stated it helped them normalise the situation, feel supported and remain in work. Peer supporters reported the need to reflect and further develop skills through clinical supervision skills and ongoing training.
Read the detailed summative report for the ‘Tiered Support Model’.
Who?
The risk management office at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT)
What?
Support for second victims provided by staff members who have themselves been involved in an incident and have made a commitment to be available to talk to other staff in a similar situation.
LIST members are identified by badges with the LIST logo, and a central list of these staff members is held by the risk management office.
Individuals who have been involved in an incident are able to approach any member of staff with a LIST logo for support, or contact the risk management office to be put in touch with someone.
Concerns about a member of staff’s health and well-being are escalated to the risk management team, and staff members can also contact the LTHT staff counselling service.
Further information:
There is now a huge amount of evidence from different countries and across different professional groups that being involved in a patient safety incident, particularly one where the patient is seriously harmed or dies can be very distressing (Sirriyeh, Lawton and Gardner, 2010). The feelings of guilt, shame, incompetence, anxiety that are reported to be experienced by staff in these situations are heightened when the individual feels that it was their error or mistake that caused the adverse event. Of the 1,463 doctors we surveyed in the UK (Harrison, Lawton and Stewart, 2014), 76% believed that the experience of a patient safety incident had affected them personally or professionally, 74% reported stress, 68% anxiety, 60% sleep disturbance and 63% lower professional confidence. Moreover, 81% became anxious about the potential for future errors. It is not only doctors who suffer. In fact, in another study (Harrison et al., 2015) we found that nurses showed higher levels of distress following an adverse event than doctors.
For many people the emotional impact of the error is short-lived, but for some the effects are long-lasting. In our sample, 8% of doctors reported symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is why the term ‘second victim’ was coined. The emotional impacts of making an error are many, but there are other impacts too that make it so important that we don’t ignore, or even punish further, those that have been involved in an adverse event. There is evidence that a loss of confidence and distress that is often exacerbated by the incident investigation process can lead to burnout, hyper-vigilance and the practice of defensive medicine. Without support, second victims may even choose to leave the profession. From a moral standpoint, supporting people in distress is essential. There is also a safety and financial imperative to do so.
Sirriyeh, R., Lawton, R., Gardner, P., & Armitage, G. (2010). Coping with medical error: a systematic review of papers to assess the effects of involvement in medical errors on healthcare professionals’ psychological well-being. Qual Saf Health Care, 19(6), e43-e43.
Harrison, R., Lawton, R., & Stewart, K. (2014). Doctors’ experiences of adverse events in secondary care: the professional and personal impact. Clinical Medicine, 14(6), 585-590.
Harrison, R., Lawton, R., Perlo, J., Gardner, P., Armitage, G., & Shapiro, J. (2015). Emotion and coping in the aftermath of medical error: a cross-country exploration. Journal of patient safety, 11(1), 28-35.
