Effectiveness of a tool for structuring action plan after analysis of adverse event

Abstract

Context: Methods and tools which enabled healthcare organization for learning from adverse events focus mainly on reporting and analysis phases. However, formulating appropriate action plan is also a difficult phase that current methods do not help us with. Objective: To assess the effectiveness of a tool for structuring action plan for hospital risk managers. Method: A randomization procedure has been used to assign 56 voluntary hospital risk managers in two groups differing only by the use of the tool. Each group had to identify causes and formulate an action plan for two scenarios of adverse drug events successively. The first measure was realized without tool. In the second measure, only the intervention group used the tool. Results: The mean difference in the number of relevant actions proposed by participants between the two measures was statistically significant between the reference group (M = − 0.6, SD = 2.2) and the intervention group (M = 1.3, SD = 2.2), t(53) = 2.96, p = < .01). In a linear mixed effects model for longitudinal data, the number of proposed actions was statistically higher in the intervention group with a difference of 2.4 actions, 95% CI [1.43, 3.40], p < .001 and 1.1 actions, 95% CI [0.02, 2.00], p < .05) for scenario 1 and scenario 2 respectively. Discussion: Our study confirms the effectiveness of the tool in two scenarios. Further studies could assess its effectiveness in other adverse events, its feasibility and acceptability by hospital risk managers before proposing its broad use.