The Department of Defense (DoD) is on a journey to transform the Military Health System (MHS) into a high reliability organization (HRO) to ensure safe, reliable care for all of its patients and their families. This transformative shift is one that requires a laser-sharp focus by every one of us – leadership and frontline staff – to identify high-risk situations before they lead to an adverse event. To make this possible, prevention and performance improvement must become intrinsic elements of what we do on a daily basis. First, however, we must understand the progress each of our military treatment facilities (MTFs) is making towards the high reliability goal.

To measure our progress and help target our improvement efforts, we assess our organizational culture so that we can use the results to drive enterprise wide improvement initiatives. To that end, the MHS conducted the Patient Safety Culture Survey from February through mid-Apil 2016.

Following the dissemination of the survey results, MHS patient safety leadership and staff will be able to leverage the soon-to-be-released MHS Patient Safety Culture Survey Resource Guide – a resource designed to help you interpret Culture Survey results and learn actionable ways to improve patient safety culture at the MTF level. More specifically, the Culture Survey Resource Guide will help leadership and patient safety staff to:

• Understand response rate at the MTF/local level
• Identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement
• Display and share data
• Understand results within the context of each MTF
• Develop an Action Plan

To ensure success when interpreting and addressing your MTF results, the Culture Survey Resource Guide, also provides specifics on how to develop an Action Plan, including:

• Ensure Leadership Commitment
• Form a Change Team
• Develop an Action Plan based on guiding questions such as:
  • Which areas of your patient safety culture do you want to focus on for improvement
  • What are your goals?
  • What initiatives will you implement?
  • What are possible barriers, and how can they be overcome?
  • How will you measure progress and success?

One key recommendation on the Culture Survey Resource Guide is to use the Action Plan your MTF develops to guide your team’s preferred performance improvement model (for example, Plan Do Study Act cycle) as a way to get additional guidance on implementation, evaluation, and sustainment of your patient safety initiatives. The biggest take-away is that we have the power to address areas of improvement at our MTFs. Together, we can turn the Patient Safety Culture Survey results into fuel for action, innovation and change at our facilities.

As the MHS continues on its path towards providing safe, reliable care, we as patient safety champions, must continue to be transparent on our efforts to mitigate errors and identify potential issues proactively. Please visit the DoD PSP website in the coming weeks to access the Culture Survey Resource Guide.

One step at a time, MTFs across the MHS will continue to make progress towards high reliability and achieving zero patient harm.