A Comprehensive Approach to Identifying Intervention Targets for Patient-Safety Improvement in a Hospital Setting

Despite differences in approaches to organizational problem solving, healthcare managers and organizational behavior management (OBM) practitioners share a number of practices, and connecting healthcare management with OBM may lead to improvements in patient safety. A broad needs-assessment methodology was applied to identify patient-safety intervention targets in a large rural medical center. This included a content analysis of descriptions of managers' follow-up actions to error reports for nine types of the most frequently occurring errors. Follow-up actions were coded according to the taxonomy of behavioral intervention components developed by Geller et al. (1990). Two error types were identified as targets for intervention, and the outcome of this assessment process indicated a clear need to apply OBM interventions at the management level and thus have a hospital-wide benefit to patient safety. Future implications for using a system-wide approach to identifying and classifying responses to medical error are discussed.