Errspitals · A knowledge transfer and sharing action for developing A new integrative approach to mitigating errors in hospitals: Resolving tensions in error research
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-01-01 → 2018-12-31
- EU contribution
- €180,000
- Participants
- 5
- Scheme
- MSCA-RISE
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.
Results in brief
A knowledge transfer and sharing action for developing A new integrative approach to mitigating errors in hospitals: Resolving tensions in error research
Policy makers, healthcare administrators and caregivers, and researchers in Europe and around the world generally agree that medical errors in healthcare pose a serious problem to the society at large. As a result, healthcare organizations invest a considerable amount of effort in the development and implementation of a variety of error elimination and quality improvement programs. Nevertheless, so far, there is little evidence that healthcare is becoming safer, and the system is still functioning at significantly lower safety levels than it could and should be. Why is the healthcare system still unable to achieve a breakthrough in mitigating errors? Some policy makers believe that this is a problem resulting from lack of commitment to patient safety or insufficient implementation of error elimination and quality assurance practices. We, however, suggest that either organizational goodwill or implementation difficulties is a simplistic explanation of the problem. Rather, one of the origins of the healthcare challenges is nested in current state of error research. That is, a lack of cross-fertilization between different insights from distinct approaches to errors indeed raises inconsistent views or research tensions that have yet to be reconciled. As a timely response to such a call, in this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions we aim to develop a new, integrative approach to mitigating medical errors and promoting quality, efficiency, and innovation in hospitals.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Errors are a recurring fact of organizational life and the wisdom of managing and learning from errors is incontrovertible. In particular, medical errors in the health care industry, defined as avoidable adverse outcomes or injuries to patients stemming from healthcare processes, pose serious threats to human life and have an impact on total national costs. Yet, healthcare organizations that achieve a breakthrough in mitigating errors are extraordinarily rare. The aim of this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions proposal is thus to improve our understanding of the occurrence of medical errors and to develop a new, integrative approach to mitigating medical errors and promoting quality, efficiency, and innovativeness in hospitals. We strive for this goal by immersing ourselves in broad literature reviews and going beyond state of the art, collecting massive first-hand data in the hospital settings, and testing our working hypotheses on both qualitative and quantitative data. We envision three direct outcomes of our endeavor that are beneficial to both the academic community and heath care organizations. First, we will suggest an integrative theory of errors in organizations by identifying discrepancies, tensional issues, and opportunities for research synthesis via level of analysis and temporal and priority lenses. Second, we will develop an innovative, hybrid method to illuminate the errors phenomena and assess long-term effects of medical errors. Third, starting with the partnership between three participating research teams, we will create a long-lasting network that offers a rich resource for collaboration and knowledge-sharing that makes this resource more visible, inspectable, and systematic, which may aid the process of learning at a larger societal level.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TECHNION - ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · HaifaCoordinatorIsrael
- BABSON COLLEGE · Babson ParkCity levelUnited States
- PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY · Malibu CaUnited States
- TILBURG UNIVERSITY- UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG · TilburgNetherlands
- UNIVERSITAET ST. GALLEN · St GallenSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union