Healthcare HROs

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are complex adaptive systems that operate in hazardous and challenging environments but manage to maintain safety and reliability despite the inherent risks and hazards. These organizations are characterized by their ability to operate reliably in the face of disasters or any potential hazard, often through a combination of organizational culture, safe best practices, and systems that prioritize safety and resilience while making them consistently achieving their goals with the minimal possible errors. This is mostly seen in aviation industries, nuclear power plants, where safety and reliability are critical to their operations.

The 5 common traits of HROs are:

1. Preoccupation with Failure: ?Every employee at each level is encouraged to think proactively and identify potential failures in their processes. HROs staff actively look for small inefficiencies or near misses as well as major failures, learning from them to create better systems that prevent actual accidents.

2. Be reluctant to accept simplify Interpretations to problems: They avoid oversimplifying complex situations, they resist broad excuses and acknowledge that an understanding is essential for effective decision-making. They dig deeply enough to find the root cause of a problem.

3. Sensitivity to Operations: Leaders and staff maintain an acute awareness of their operational environment, encouraging each frontline employees to pay attention to operations and communicate issues and observations that are taken in consideration in decision making and operational improvement initiatives.

4. Deference to Expertise: Decision-making is often decentralized, allowing those with the most relevant expertise to voice concerns, find solutions and take charge, regardless of their formal position within the organization. Leaders encouraging this approach build easily a high reliability culture where frequent rounds with employees allow observing processes at the workplace.

5. Commitment to Resilience: In these institutions, everyone is able to adapt to changing circumstances. Continuous preparedness?to respond to failures and recover from unexpected events?allows them to prevent future catastrophes.

?While aviation was able to drop their accident rates by 45% in the last 20 years and improve safety through those principles, we are still facing in the healthcare industry a high mortality rate due to preventable medical errors. Approximately one in 20 patients are still developing a hospital acquired infection and one third of patients above 65 years old are still falling in hospitals.

Implementing High Reliability Organization (HRO) principles in healthcare is today needed more than ever to?enhance patient safety and operational effectiveness.

Leadership Commitment to prioritize safety and reliability is important to foster a culture where these values are integral to decision-making.