Chapter 1. Introduction
Patient safety is a critical component of health care
quality. As medical offices continually strive to improve, there is growing
recognition of the importance of establishing a culture of patient safety.
Achieving a culture of patient safety requires an understanding of the values,
beliefs, and norms about what is important in a medical office and which
attitudes and behaviors related to patient safety are supported, rewarded, and expected.
Recognizing the need for a measurement tool to assess the
culture of patient safety in medical offices, the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality (AHRQ) funded and supervised development of the Medical
Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture. This work is an extension of research
used to develop the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture.
Developers reviewed research pertaining to safety, patient
safety, health care quality, ambulatory medicine, medical errors, error
reporting, safety climate and culture, and organizational climate and culture.
In addition, they reviewed existing medical office surveys. The researchers
also consulted more than two dozen experts in the field of medical office
practice and patient safety and many medical office providers and staff for
help in identifying key topics and issues. Based on these activities, the
researchers identified a potential list of dimensions to include in the survey.
The survey was pilot tested and revised, and AHRQ released it
in 2009. It was designed to assess medical office staff opinions about patient
safety issues, medical error, and event reporting. The survey includes 38 items
that measure 10 composites of patient safety culture. In addition to the
composite items, 14 items measure how often medical offices have problems
exchanging information with other settings and other patient safety and quality
issues. Each of the 10 patient safety culture composites is listed and defined
in Table 1-1.
The survey also includes questions
that ask respondents to rate their medical office in five areas of health care
quality (patient centered, effective, timely, efficient, equitable) and to
provide an overall patient safety rating. In addition, respondents are asked to
provide limited background demographic information.
The survey's toolkit materials are available at the AHRQ Web
site (http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/patientsafetyculture/mosurvindex.htm)
and include the survey, survey items and dimensions, user's guide, feedback report
template, information about the Microsoft® Excel® Data Entry and Analysis Tool,
and the Medical Office Patient Safety Improvement Resource List. The toolkit
provides medical offices with the basic knowledge and tools needed to conduct a
patient safety culture assessment and suggestions for using the data.
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2012 Comparative Database Report
Since its release, the medical office survey has been
implemented in hundreds of medical offices across the United States. Medical
offices administering the survey have expressed interest in comparing their
results with other medical offices as an additional source of information to
help them identify areas of strength and areas for improvement. In response to
these requests, AHRQ funded the Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety
Culture Comparative Database to enable medical offices to compare their most
recent survey results with other medical offices and to eventually examine
trends in patient safety culture over time. Medical offices interested in
submitting to the database should go to the AHRQ Web site for more information (http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/mosurvey11/mosubinfo.htm).
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The survey results presented in this report represent the
largest compilation of medical office patient safety culture survey data
currently available and therefore provide a useful reference for comparison.
However, several limitations to these data should be kept in mind.
First, medical offices that administered the survey were not
required to undergo any training and administered the survey in different ways.
Some medical offices used an outside company or vendor to handle the survey
data collection tasks. Other medical offices administered the survey themselves.
It is possible that these different collection methods could lead to
differences in survey response; further research is needed to determine whether
and how different collection methods affect the results.
Second, the data medical offices submitted have been cleaned
for out-of-range values (e.g., invalid response values due to data entry
errors) and blank records (where responses to all survey items were missing).
In addition, some logic checks were made. Otherwise, data are presented as
submitted. No additional attempts were made to verify or audit the accuracy of
the data submitted.
Finally, medical
offices that submitted data to the database are not a statistically selected
sample of all U.S. medical offices since only medical offices that voluntarily
administered the survey and were willing to submit their data for inclusion in
the database are represented.
Medical
offices are typically characterized as either those with one or two physicians
or group medical practices consisting of three or more physicians. According to
the U.S. Census Bureau 2007 Economic Census (2007 NAICS code 6211 "Offices of
physicians"), there were 220,131 physicians' offices in the United States (http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml).
A 2008
report from the National Center for Health Statistics presents estimates of the
number and characteristics of medical practices with which physicians are
associated. These data, from the 2005-2006 National Ambulatory Medical Care
Surveys (NAMCS), estimate that during 2005-2006 there were 163,700 medical
practices in the United States. This is considerably lower than the 220,131
physicians' offices in the U.S. Census Bureau 2007 Economic Census.
To provide a
basic comparison of the database medical offices with these medical office
population estimates, Table 1-2 shows the geographic distribution (http://www.census.gov/econ/industry/geo/g6211.htm) of the AHRQ Medical Office Survey
on Patient Safety Culture database. This distribution is compared with the
distribution of physicians' offices based on the 2007 U.S. Economic Census and
the NAMCS estimates of the number of office-based medical practices in
2005-2006. The table shows that the 934 AHRQ database medical offices represent
less than 1 percent of the estimated population of medical offices. In addition,
database medical offices overrepresent the Midwest region and underrepresent
medical offices in the West and Northeast.
Additional
comparisons of the AHRQ database medical offices with other characteristics of
the population of medical offices are not available. Subsequent chapters of
this report only present information about the characteristics of AHRQ database
medical offices.
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