Navigating patient safety: The role of digital transformation and frontline healthcare professionals
Delivering safe, effective, and reliable care is a top priority for healthcare organisations. However, achieving this consistently poses challenges. Balancing quality improvement initiatives while meeting safety goals requires innovative solutions. While research on patient safety often highlights risks and causes of harm, it doesn’t always offer actionable strategies to address these challenges.
At its core, patient safety focuses on two perspectives:
- Safety I: Analysing incidents to identify what went wrong, often leading to stricter protocols and procedures.
- Safety II: Exploring what goes right, highlighting the adaptability, initiative, and collaboration of healthcare professionals.
Despite advancements in incident reporting, especially in primary care, much of the valuable data collected remains underutilised in improving care quality.
In Australia, digital transformation is reshaping healthcare, especially in safety and quality management. Advanced technologies streamline operations, reduce risks, and improve patient care. However, achieving digital clinical safety requires two critical approaches:
- Ensuring technology itself is safe and reliable.
- Leveraging technology to enhance safety across systems.
To truly benefit from these advancements, digital safety must become an integral part of healthcare culture, supported by clear processes, robust standards, and active collaboration across the sector).
The role of frontline professionals
Engaging frontline healthcare professionals, especially nurses and medical staff, is essential to improving patient safety. Their involvement in planning, implementing, and evaluating safety programs helps to ensure these initiatives are practical, effective, and sustainable. For example, nurses play a pivotal role in falls prevention programs and their active participation in planning, implementing, and evaluating interventions has been shown to lead to measurable success.
A review of global data revealed that nurses are responsible for 83.7% of all critical incident reports, emphasising their importance in fostering a culture of safety. Providing targeted training and involving these professionals in preventive programs can drive significant improvements in care quality.
The path forward
Patient safety is now recognised as a global health priority, with digital transformation offering new opportunities to advance it. However, achieving a safer healthcare system requires collaboration across healthcare organisations, industry partners, and communities. To move forward, we should prioritise:
- Education and training.
- Clear standards and guidelines.
- A commitment to sharing best practices.
- Innovation and collaboration across all levels of healthcare.
By focusing on these areas, we can build a safer, more resilient healthcare system where digital tools and frontline expertise work together to protect patients and enhance care.
- Abou Elnour A, Morgan M, Dawda P, Ford D, Dunbar J. Patient Safety Manual for Primary Care. APHCRI Centre of Research Excellence on Primary Health Care Microsystems. The University of Queensland, 2014.
- Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. Patient safety and quality improvement in primary care: Consultation paper. Sydney: ACSQHC; 2017.
- Avanecean, D., Calliste, D., Contreras, T., Lim, Y., & Fitzpatrick, A. (2017). Effectiveness of patient-centered interventions on falls in the acute care setting compared to usual care: a systematic review. JBI Database of Systematic Reviews and Implementation Reports, 15(12), 3006–3048. https://doi.org/10.11124/JBISRIR-2016-003331.
- Flott, K., Maguire, J., & Phillips, N. (2021). Digital safety: the next frontier for patient safety. Future Healthcare Journal, 8(3), e598–e601. https://doi.org/10.7861/fhj.2021-0152.
- Frankel A, Haraden C, Federico F, Lenoci-Edwards J. A Framework for Safe, Reliable, and Effective Care. White Paper. Cambridge, MA: Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Safe & Reliable Healthcare; 2017.
- Goekcimen, K. et al. (2022). Addressing patient safety hazards using critical incident reporting in hospitals: A systematic review. Journal of Patient Safety. [Preprint]. doi:10.1097/pts.0000000000001072.
- Hernan AL, Giles SJ, Carson-Stevens A, et al. Nature and type of patient-reported safety incidents in primary care: cross-sectional survey of patients from Australia and England. BMJ Open 2021;11:e042551. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2020-042551.
- Melin CM. (2018). Reducing falls in the inpatient hospital setting. International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 16(1), 25-31. doi:10.1097/XEB.0000000000000115.
- Mistri, I. U., Badge, A., & Shahu, S. (2023). Enhancing Patient Safety Culture in Hospitals. Cureus, 15(12), e51159. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.51159.
- Montejano-Lozoya, R., Miguel-Montoya, I., Gea-Caballero, V., et al. (2020). Impact of Nurses' Intervention in Patient Safety Programs.
- Payne, R., Clarke, A., Swann, N., et al. (2023). Patient safety in remote primary care encounters: Multimethod qualitative study combining Safety I and Safety II analysis. BMJ Quality & Safety, 33(9), 573–586. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016674.
- Ricciardi, W., & Cascini, F. (2021). Guidelines and Safety Practices for Improving Patient Safety. In Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management (pp. 3–18).
This publication is not comprehensive and does not constitute legal or medical advice. You should seek legal or other professional advice before relying on any content and practice proper clinical decision making with regard to the individual circumstances. Persons implementing any recommendations contained in this publication must exercise their own independent skill or judgment or seek appropriate professional advice relevant to their own particular practice. Compliance with any recommendations will not in any way guarantee discharge of the duty of care owed to patients and others coming into contact with the health professional or practice. Avant and Cgov are not responsible to you or anyone else for any loss suffered in connection with the use of this information. Information is only current at the date initially published. © Avant Mutual Group Limited 2024.