TeamSTEPPS®

https://www.ahrq.gov/teamstepps-program/index.html Kaiser Permanente School of Anesthesia Uses AHRQ’s Surveys on Patient Safety Culture, TeamSTEPPS® The Kaiser Permanente (KP) School of Anesthesia in Pasadena, Calif., uses AHRQ’s Surveys on Patient Safety Culture (SOPS®) to improve ambulatory care and expand doctoral students’ education. The school has used the SOPS Hospital Survey in the past and recently conducted an analysis of nationwide data from the SOPS Ambulatory Surgery Center Survey. Using the findings, school officials are working to improve patient safety and training for certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) using TeamSTEPPS. AHRQ surveys are available for hospitals, medical offices, nursing homes, community pharmacies and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). The ASC survey is designed to get feedback from the staff about the culture of patient safety where they work. “Each year, KP School of Anesthesiology students must complete rigorous projects clinically relevant to nurse anesthesiology,” explained Mark Gabot, D.N.P., CRNA, faculty advisor for the project. “I worked with the hospital SOPS survey a couple of years ago. This time, I wanted to do something on a larger scale. We reached out to AHRQ and were able to get access to the nationwide ASC data for 2021 through 2023. Both certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) and physician anesthesiologists had completed the surveys,” he said. The project helped identify strengths and areas for improvement, as well as create best-practice recommendations for patient safety from an anesthesia-informed perspective. After reviewing the data, the team recommended regular use of ASC SOPS and TeamSTEPPS, establishment of a “just culture” for anesthesia practitioners and implementation of a patient safety reporting system. In response to the project results, the KP School of Anesthesia is improving its TeamSTEPPS training program. “Every year, we conduct TeamSTEPPS training for our students to promote that just culture,” Dr. Gabot said. “Thanks to this project, we’re actually reformatting our TeamSTEPPS approach and education to reflect what the team found in the secondary analysis study.”