Sharing is caring: the importance of transparency in adverse events

This review provides an overview of the concept of transparency, focusing on the various ways that adverse events are shared within and across departments in a single institution, across different institutions, and with national organizations.

Within a department, strategies to promote transparency from frontline clinicians to department leadership (bottom-up transparency) include easy-to-use reporting systems and maintaining a robust safety culture. Top-down transparency can be facilitated with the timely sharing of systemic changes made because of reported events and the continued cultivation of a psychologically safe learning environment. Daily safety huddles, leadership walkrounds, and shared case conferences that break down barriers in communication can encourage interdepartmental transparency. Sharing events across institutions remains challenging. In addition, while reporting events to national registries and databases does occur, top-down transparency back to hospitals and departments remains unsystematic. Finally, there exist several legal challenges to advancing transparency.

There has been much progress nationally in enhancing the transparency of adverse events. Future areas of improvement include cross-institutional transparency and facilitating the timely sharing of repeat concerns and lessons learned from national registries back with participating institutions and departments. Concerns about legal consequences when discussing adverse events may prohibit expanded transparency.