Overview of the Long-Term Care Safety Toolkit Modules and Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture

The Long-Term Care (LTC) Safety Toolkit is designed to support learning and implementation efforts to improve safety culture in LTC facilities. In six learning modules, the toolkit provides concepts and tools that aim to change the way facilities do their work and provide care, allowing for better outcomes and higher quality of care for residents.

The first step in improving safety culture in your LTC facility is establishing a baseline. One way to gather this baseline data on safety culture in your facility is to administer the Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality sponsored this survey in response to a request from nursing home leaders who needed a survey to understand the patient safety culture in LTC facilities.The survey was designed specifically for nursing home providers and staff. It solicits staff opinions about the culture of patient safety in their nursing home.

Each module in the LTC Safety Toolkit can be modified and customized to help your facility address opportunities for improvement identified in the survey. The following table links the content in the toolkit to the dimensions of the Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture. Follow these steps to help you connect the improvement areas to the toolkit materials:

1. Identify the areas of patient safety culture that require improvement in your facility.
2. Use the following table to identify which modules of the LTC Safety Toolkit can provide relevant content to address your facility's opportunities for improvement.
3. Use the Material Use Guide (MUG) in each toolkit module to educate and engage staff in performance improvement. Each MUG provides the materials, suggested teaching method, and intended audience for each topic. The topics in each module can be taught individually, or combined for a longer training session. Feel free to adapt the tools or come up with your own approach to implementing the module.