Qualitative Methods in Intensive Care Safety
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Patient Safety in Intensive Care
IRAS ID
201535
Contact name
T AW
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
More than 90,000 patients in US hospitals die each year due to health-worker errors. 45.8% of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions are associated with an adverse event and the complex medical background suggests that errors in this group will be poorly tolerated.
Traditional approaches to patient safety contend that adverse events (AEs) are due to single, causative errors though assume that AEs are always due to error, that such errors are isolated, and that the most serious AEs contain the best lessons for improvement. A systems approach suggests that AEs are due to several contributory factors and has gained credence in several safety-critical environments. Surveys and checklists have been widely used to understand this framework in intensive care, though consistently suffer from poor return-rates, an inability to explore pertinent threads and a lack of contextual information. Qualitative methods may offer a more flexible approach to understanding the causes of error, though have not been applied to ICU in the UK.
We aim to recruit multi-disciplinary intensive care workers to thematic saturation and apply a standardised, validated qualitative interviewing technique - Flanagan’s Critical Incident technique - to identify the barriers and facilitators of safe practice. We aim to demonstrate that qualitative methods identify a larger number and a more diverse spectrum of patient safety determinants, with implications for team-working, clinician training and unit design across intensive care in the UK. Further application of qualitative approaches to understanding organisational psychology in healthcare may provide novel insights to promoting patient safety.
REC name
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REC reference
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