Developing Tools to Enhance the Adaptive Capacity (Safety II) of Health Care Providers at a Children's Hospital

Current safety efforts in health care use Safety I (find and fix), which has benefits and shortcomings. Safety leaders in multiple industries realize that complex adaptive systems require a new approach-Safety II (proactive safety). Our goal was to develop practical, usable tools to spread Safety II and resilience engineering competencies to clinical frontline staff. Using our prior research and Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, we developed tools to enhance Safety II competencies that individuals with various backgrounds could understand. Tools address recognizing (Pause to Predict), responding (IDEA), and learning (Feed Forward). These are being taught organizationally in a unit-by-unit sequence. Use of these tools is expected to prompt a shift toward a more proactive mental model of safety that we want our frontline providers to adopt. Coordinating the expertise of bedside clinicians during unprecedented events can safely expand the boundaries of conditions under which we can provide high-quality care by increasing individuals' and subsequently our systems' adaptive capacity. We believe this is the first work describing attempts to operationalize Safety II concepts broadly in a health care organization.