AbstractsPsychology

Death from medical error at time of writing is the third leading cause of the death in the United States. Creating a world where patients and those who care for them are free from harm is the priority in the patient safety movement. A strong culture of prioritizing safe practices is the foundation for safe patient care; this culture can be developed and maintained by the implementation of daily safety huddles. By engaging the team in safety behaviors to achieve the goal of reducing preventable patient harm, daily safety huddles have the potential to impact the safety culture at both the unit and organizational level. Daily safety huddles are deliberate, intentional, purposed conversations in a non-punitive environment from the leader with their team about safety events, concerns, and needs so that situational awareness is created, the team has a shared mental model, and resources can be assigned to reduce the risk of potential events of harm to patients, families, and the health care team. This change project evaluated the impact of daily safety huddles on unit-level safety culture as measured by the Safety Organizing Scale (SOS) survey which is based on the principles of high reliability utilizing a pre-posttest quantitative design. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the characteristics of the inclusive of gender, race, age, experience level, and educational level. Results indicated an overall increase in mean scores from the pre-test to the post-test for all behavioral indices of safety culture with the exception of one question describing handoff communication. A statistically significant positive difference was noted between groups with p = .03 for the SOS question on discussion of mistakes and how to learn from them as a result of huddle implementation. Thus, the implementation of huddles demonstrated a clinically significant improvement in unit level safety culture and a statistically significant improvement in one domain.