Developing the Culture of Safety at FV Hospital

Building a culture of safety is an important activity to positively improve the thoughts, attitudes and behaviour of healthcare workers. However, developing a culture of safety in the healthcare setting is challenging and it takes years and years to see improvement.

Safety culture is generally measured by conducting a survey by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which is called the “Hospital Patient Safety survey”. This survey is conducted in each unit (department, specialties) and in the organisation (hospital, medical centre) as a whole. The Hospital Patient Safety survey is a useful proven tool used by hundreds of medical centres all over the world.

At FV Hospital, this survey aids us to observe our improvement over time. It helps us evaluate the impact of the patient safety activities that we have participated in a throughout the year. Through this survey, FV Hospital can determine both the advantages and disadvantages to improve the quality of medical services for patients.

The MOH and JCI also require us to measure the culture of safety periodically. The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health (CV 4233 / SYT-NV) issued the Vietnamese version of the AHRQ survey tool, this version we adopted in 2016. During the past 5 years, the result has shown the improvement of FV Hospital in building its culture of safety with the average composite increasing from 64% (2016) to 76% (2020).

In recent years, The Quality Management Department has launched a Hospital Patient Safety Survey for the executives to address the weakness found in the 2020 survey. This is one activity (recommended by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement-IHI) aims to demonstrate the commitment of management to safety by talking directly to operational staff on any issues that concern patient safety and show their support to our staff.

In the near future, the Quality Management Department together with the support of executives and managers will continue to formulate more activities to encourage the staff to be more confident in bringing safety issues to their manager and leaders. The managers and leaders will provide an atmosphere where the staff can feel valued, are able to admit mistakes and can freely talk on any safety issues that concern them.

FV Hospital will always strive to make the culture of safety a priority, where our staff are committed to do well in their patient safety roles. Besides that, FV Hospital continuously encourages staff to participate in all quality and safety activities. With a strong culture of safety, compliance to policies improves, errors are reduced, and quality improvement projects are successfully implemented so we can bring the best healthcare services with high safety standards for our patients.