Evaluating Family Safety Reporting Through an Operational and Research Taxonomy.

Area of Science:

• Patient safety
• Healthcare quality improvement
• Health informatics

Background:

• Hospitals can enhance operational safety reporting by integrating family-provided data.
• Understanding how family safety reports are classified is crucial for integration.
• Current operational systems may not capture the full spectrum of family-reported concerns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the classification of family safety reports within an operational system.
• To compare these classifications with a newer research taxonomy.
• To assess the potential for enriching hospital safety reporting with family input.

Main Methods:

• Prospective collection of safety reports from families of hospitalized children.
• Classification of reports by physicians using both operational and research taxonomies (modified Bates and colleagues, NCC-MERP).
• Assessment of interrater reliability using kappa statistics for independent review of 10% of reports.

Main Results:

• 289 family-reported safety events were analyzed.
• Operational taxonomy classified many reports as medications/fluids (29.8%) or no harm (34.6%), with 34.9% unclassifiable.
• Research taxonomy identified more diverse issues, including non-harmful errors (38.4%) and quality concerns (30.8%), with 63% deemed preventable.

Conclusions:

• Operational and research taxonomies show similar classification for many family safety events.
• Research taxonomies better capture quality and environmental hazards reported by families.
• Hospitals should integrate family-reported data, and operational systems could adopt research categories for comprehensive safety and quality insights.