title: The Johns Hopkins Hospital: identifying and addressing risks and safety issues.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  At The Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH), a culture of safety refers to the presence of characteristics such as the belief that harm is untenable and the use of a systems approach to analyzing safety issues.
  The leadership of JHH provides strategic planning guidance for safety and improvement initiatives, involves the patient safety committee in capital investment allocation decisions and in designing and planning new hospital facilities, and ensures that safety and quality head the agenda of board-of-trustees meetings. Although JHH takes a systems approach, structures such as monitoring staff behavior trends are used to hold people accountable for job performance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  JHH encountered three major hurdles in implementing and sustaining a culture of safety. First, JHH's decentralized organizational structure contributes to a silo effect that limits the spread of ideas, practices, and culture. JHH intends to create an internal collaborative of departmental safety initiatives to foster opportunities for units to share ideas and results. Second, in response to the challenge of encouraging teams to think and act in an interdisciplinary fashion, communication and teamwork training are being used to enhance the effectiveness of interdisciplinary teams. Further development of valid and meaningful safety-related measurement and data collection methodologies is JHH's largest remaining challenge.
authors.affiliation: The John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, USA. lapaine@jhmi.edu
authors.forename: Lori A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Paine
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.forename: Beryl
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rosenstein
authors.forename: Peter J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Pronovost
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers / Q000458:organization & administration*; D015142:Baltimore; D002404:Catheterization; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D017053:Infection Control; D007362:Intensive Care Units / Q000458:organization & administration; D007857:Leadership; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D015279:Organizational Culture; D009937:Organizational Objectives; D012308:Risk Management / Q000458:organization & administration*; D018571:Sentinel Surveillance; D012941:Social Responsibility