Safety culture
Safety Culture Measurement Tools
As part of Mental Health Patient Safety Program, we will work with mental health teams to help facilitate a safety culture. Safety Culture is a demonstrably reliable predictor of clinical safety behaviours and patient safety outcomes. Enhanced culture has been shown to improve the psychological health of providers and increase engagement and satisfaction at work. Ultimately, a healthier culture benefits both patients and providers.
The CEC has developed guidelines and tools to enable your mental health service to administer a safety culture survey, identify improvement priorities and to lead quality improvement against these priorities.
Safety Fundamentals for Teams
We strongly encourage and support mental health teams to implement the Safety Fundamentals for Teams. These can help improve teamwork and communication, create a culture of safety and are key elements of high reliability organisations. Our inability to communicate effectively within teams and with patients and their carers is directly linked to patient harm.
Safety Fundamentals are practical tools, most of which require a short implementation time and have the potential to bring quick measurable gains.
There are eight Safety Fundamentals:
Morbidity and Mortality Review Meetings
New guidelines for Morbidity and Mortality review meetings were released in October 2020. The Clinical Excellence Commission will facilitate and support clinical directors and senior mental health clinicians to test, implement, and, evaluate these guidelines in NSW mental health services, to ensure greater learning and improvement from serious incidents.