Resources by National Action Plan Foundational Area
Contents
Culture, Leadership, and Governance
AHRQ Patient Safety Net (PSNet) Primer: Safety Culture
This resource provides an overview of patient safety culture and covers key concepts.
AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture® (SOPS®) and Additional Resources
These surveys are focused on assessing an organization’s culture of safety from the perspective of providers and staff. Survey tools are tailored for hospitals, medical offices, nursing homes, community pharmacies, and ambulatory surgery centers. Additional resources include improvement resources, case studies, and tools for data entry and analysis and strategic planning.
Assistant Secretary for Technology and Policy (ASTP) SAFER Guides
The SAFER Guides are a set of self-assessment tools geared toward addressing and optimizing electronic health record (EHR) safety for all healthcare providers. Each guide includes a self-assessment as well as recommended practices for ensuring EHR system safety.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Training: Safety Culture in Healthcare Settings
CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provides training for healthcare workers to increase their knowledge about strategies to address work-related hazards and promote a safe and healthy work environment.
Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Patient Safety Assessment Tool
Organizations can use this tool to assist patient safety and quality managers and staff in conducting an objective assessment of their patient safety program. The tool is organized by six program elements and includes a list of questions and rationale for assessment.
Patient and Family Engagement
AHRQ Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Ambulatory Care Improvement Guide
This comprehensive resource is for health plans, medical groups, and other providers seeking to improve their performance in the domains of patient experience measured by the CAHPS surveys of ambulatory care.
AHRQ CANDOR (Communication and Optimal Resolution) Toolkit
This resource provides healthcare organizations with the tools to respond immediately when a patient is harmed and to promote candid, empathetic communication and timely resolution for patients, caregivers, and the healthcare organization.
AHRQ Guide to Improving Patient Safety in Primary Care Settings by Engaging Patients and Families
This resource offers four interventions (Be Prepared to Be Engaged; Create a Safe Medicine List Together; Teach-Back; and Warm Handoff Plus) and case studies designed to improve patient safety by meaningfully engaging patients and families in their care.
AHRQ Guide to Patient and Family Engagement in Hospital Quality and Safety
This guide helps hospitals work as partners with patients and families to improve quality and safety. It includes an implementation handbook and tools for patients, families, and clinicians.
AHRQ Improving Healthcare Safety by Engaging Patients and Families
This resource summarizes 53 AHRQ-funded projects to improve patient safety by supporting increased patient and family engagement.
AHRQ TeamSTEPPS® 3.0 (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety)
TeamSTEPPS 3.0 is an evidence-based resource to optimize team performance across the healthcare delivery system focused on leadership, situation monitoring, mutual support, and communication. TeamSTEPPS is applicable to many clinical settings (e.g., hospitals, long-term care, office practices) and team participants (e.g., providers, patients, support staff, administrators).
AHRQ Toolkit for Engaging Patients to Improve Diagnostic Safety
This resource enhances communication and information sharing within the patient-provider encounter to improve diagnostic safety. Each strategy contains practical materials to support adoption within office-based practices.
Workforce Safety
Addressing Health Worker Burnout: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce
This Advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General calls attention to the significant issue of health worker burnout, including recommending changes to the systems, structures, and cultures that shape health care and outlining steps that different stakeholders can take together to address health worker burnout. In addition to the downloadable Advisory, the webpage presents ways to take action and key takeaways from the Advisory for ease of review.
AHRQ Burnout in Primary Care: Assessing and Addressing It in Your Practice
This resource includes tools and strategies designed to support primary care practice administrators in addressing staff burnout and improving staff well-being.
AHRQ PSNet Primer: Burnout
This article provides an overview of burnout in healthcare and covers key definitions and concepts. Authors discuss current efforts to prevent and reduce burnout, including a guide for implementing organizational strategies to prevent and reduce burnout.
AHRQ SOPS® Hospital Workplace Safety Supplemental Item Set
The SOPS® Workplace Safety Supplemental Item Set for hospitals is used with the core SOPS® Hospital Survey to help hospitals assess the extent to which their organization's culture supports workplace safety for providers and staff.
AHRQ SOPS® Nursing Home Workplace Safety Supplemental Item Set
The SOPS® Workplace Safety Supplemental Item Set for nursing homes is used with the core SOPS® Nursing Home Survey to help nursing homes assess the extent to which their organization's culture supports workplace safety for staff.
Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) Provider Burden Reduction
This strategy framework focuses on reducing the regulatory and administrative burden created by the use of health information technology (IT), such as electronic health records (EHRs), for providers. The report contains strategies and recommendations to address challenges with clinical documentation, health IT usability and the user experience, EHR reporting, and public health reporting.
CDC Impact Wellbeing Guide
This guide for executive leaders is based on a systems approach to build trust between leaders and healthcare workers. To improve the well-being of all healthcare workers, executive leaders can use the guide to move through six evidence-informed actions that include tools and resources.
CDC Slip, Trip, and Fall Prevention for Healthcare Workers
This workbook helps healthcare workers recognize and reduce risks for slips, trips, and falls through preventing, reducing, or eliminating hazards. The workbook also offers support for implementing a slip, trip, and falls prevention program in a healthcare facility.
CDC Stop Sticks Campaign
The Stop Sticks campaign is a communication intervention aimed at raising awareness among healthcare workers about their risk of workplace exposure to bloodborne pathogens from needlesticks and other sharps-related injuries. The campaign site includes planning, implementation, and evaluation strategies that organizations can use to raise awareness and decrease needlestick injuries.
CDC Fundamentals of Total Worker Health Approaches: Essential Elements for Advancing Worker Safety, Health, and Well-Being
Organizations can use this workbook to develop new initiatives or align existing workplace interventions with CDC’s Total Worker Health approach to improving workers’ safety, health, and well-being. The workbook can help organizations conduct a baseline self-assessment, develop an action plan with steps to improve based on current status, and measure progress.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) eTool for Hospitals
Hospitals can use these standalone, interactive web-based training tools to educate staff on a variety of occupational safety and health topics. Modules are organized by setting (such as emergency department and surgical suite) and by hospital department (such as central sterile supply and housekeeping).
OSHA How Safe Is Your Hospital for Workers?
This self-assessment tool can help hospital leaders determine what questions to ask their safety, risk, and human resources managers to better understand how safe the workplace is and how it measures up against other hospitals.
OSHA Safe Patient Handling Programs: Effectiveness and Cost Savings
This resource presents hospital administrators a business case for investing in safe patient handling programs, policies, and equipment, based on findings from hospitals across the U.S. that have successfully implemented these programs. In addition, it provides a set of steps administrators can take to establish a business case for their facility.
OSHA Safe Patient Handling Information and Implementation Guidance
This resource supports understanding of and action around safe patient handling to prevent healthcare worker injury and promote patient safety in long-term care, acute care, and home health settings, as well as for workers in other settings where patient handling is performed (e.g., physical therapy, radiology). Guidelines, how-to guides, training modules, and implementation guidance are organized by the healthcare setting for which they are tailored.
OSHA Safe Patient Handling: A Self-Assessment
Patient handling is a common and preventable source of healthcare employee injuries. Organizations can use this brief questionnaire to examine the number and nature of patient handling injuries in their hospital, identify what they are already doing well, and identify opportunities for improvement.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being Framework and Resources
HHS’ Five Essentials for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being offer a foundation that workplaces of any size, across any industry, can build upon. The framework is built upon five essential components (protection from harm; connection and community; work-life harmony; mattering at work; and opportunity for growth) around which workplaces can create a plan to implement practices to help strengthen workplace well being. A resource library and key downloads are also available, including reflection questions for leaders and examples of organizations that are applying the framework in their workplaces.
Learning Systems
AHRQ Calibrate Dx: A Resource To Improve Diagnostic Decisions
This self-evaluation tool helps clinicians improve their diagnostic decision making. It provides structured exercises and tools to help clinicians learn from reviewing their clinical practice.
AHRQ Measure Dx: A Resource To Identify, Analyze, and Learn From Diagnostic Safety Events
This resource helps clinicians, quality, safety and risk management professionals, and other health system leaders detect, analyze, and learn from diagnostic safety events.
AHRQ Quality Indicators
AHRQ’s quality indicators are standardized, evidence-based measures of healthcare quality that can be used to measure and track clinical performance and outcomes. They include measures for prevention, inpatient hospital care, patient safety, pediatric hospital care, and emergency department care.
CMS QualityNet
QualityNet offers healthcare providers and others resources and data reporting tools to support quality improvement efforts. Information about relevant CMS quality programs is available for multiple settings, including inpatient and outpatient hospitals, rural emergency hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, cancer hospitals, end-stage renal disease facilities, and inpatient psychiatric facilities.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) MedSun Medical Product Safety Network
Through this program, participating clinical sites report adverse medical device events, and FDA works collaboratively with users to identify, understand, and solve problems with the use of medical devices.
