The National Patient Safety Foundation has published guidelines developed to help healthcare organizations improve the way they investigate medical errors, adverse events and near misses.
The guidelines — called RCA2: Improving Root Cause Analyses and Actions to Prevent Harm — have been endorsed by numerous healthcare organizations and are being widely distributed to hospitals, health systems and other settings.
The root cause analysis process is widely used by health professionals to discover how and why errors occur. Still, RCA initiatives have produced inconsistent results and successes. NPSF, with a grant from The Doctors Company Foundation, convened a panel of subject matter experts and stakeholders to examine best practices around RCAs and develop guidelines to help health professionals standardize the process.
Click here to access the NPSF guidelines.
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