Impact of organizational culture on preventability assessment of selected adverse events in the ICU: evaluation of morbidity and mortality conferences.

Purpose: To determine whether organizational culture is associated with preventability assessment of reported adverse events (AE) in intensive care units (ICU).

Design: Blind review of time randomly distributed case notes written in the form of structured abstracts by the nurses who participated in recently implemented morbidity and mortality conferences from December 2006 to June 2010 in a 18-bed ICU in France. Ninety-five abstracts summarizing the discussions of 95 AE involving 95 patients were reviewed by two external blinded pairs (each comprised of one senior intensivist and one psychologist).