Developing and Aligning a Safety Event Taxonomy for Inpatient Psychiatry

Area of Science:

• Psychiatric safety
• Healthcare quality improvement
• Taxonomy development

Background:

• Inpatient psychiatric safety events are understudied.
• Lack of standardized measurement infrastructure for psychiatric safety.
• Need to integrate general safety events with psychiatry-specific concerns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and align an inpatient psychiatric safety event taxonomy.
• To blend well-established safety events with psychiatry-specific concerns.
• To create a measurement infrastructure for psychiatric safety.

Main Methods:

• Hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis of 483 reported safety events.
• Inductive phase: Describing semantic subject and context of safety concerns.
• Deductive phase: Aligning taxonomy with literature, national standards, and local experts.

Main Results:

• Developed a 4-domain taxonomy: Provision of care, patient actions, environment/equipment, and safety culture.
• Each domain is a mutually exclusive typology of events.
• Taxonomy provides a parsimonious view of inpatient psychiatric safety concerns.

Conclusions:

• The developed taxonomy addresses understudied psychiatric safety events.
• It can enhance patient safety measurement systems in psychiatric hospitals.
• Ultimately aims to improve patient and community safety.