Healthcare Worker Serious Safety Events: Applying Concepts from Patient Safety to Improve Healthcare Worker Safety.

Introduction: Patient safety has improved pediatric healthcare by defining when patient safety events meet criteria as serious safety events (SSEs). Similar concepts apply to healthcare worker (HCW) safety. We describe the newly designed process for HCW injury reporting, the process for evaluating HCW SSEs, and early experience with the new systems.

Creating a Defined Process to Improve the Timeliness of Serious Safety Event Determination and Root Cause Analysis.

Unlabelled: Serious Safety Events (SSEs) are defined as events in which there is a deviation from clinically accepted performance standards, causation, and significant patient harm or death. Given the nature of SSEs, it is important that the processes for declaration of SSEs, the performance of a root cause analysis (RCA), and action plan formation occur quickly, such that the window for potential recurrence of similar events is as small as possible. This manuscript describes a process put in place to improve the timeliness of SSE determination and RCA conduction and evaluates the effect of the process change on these parameters.