Development and reliability of the explicit professional oral communication observation tool to quantify the use of non-technical skills in healthcare.

Background: A lack of non-technical skills is increasingly recognised as an important underlying cause of adverse events in healthcare. The nature and number of things professionals communicate to each other can be perceived as a product of their use of non-technical skills. This paper describes the development and reliability of an instrument to measure and quantify the use of non-technical skills by direct observations of explicit professional oral communication (EPOC) in the clinical situation.

The relationship between patient safety culture and the implementation of organizational patient safety defences at emergency departments.

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the association between 11 patient safety culture dimensions and the implementation of 7 organizational patient safety defences.

Design: Data were gathered within a cross-sectional, retrospective survey.

Setting: Emergency departments (EDs) in the Netherlands.