Safety First: How Psychological, Professional, and Physical Safety Shape Nurse Success

In

addition to hearing

you speak

about trauma-informed professional development, you had an article, it's been a few years, I think, about this idea of safety and healthcare and the importance of the different types of safety.

So maybe we should start kind of there, kind of laying the groundwork around safety and what it is that we're talking about and what it all really does encompass when we're talking about safety issues.

for nurses and healthcare?

Yeah, I think, I mean, in the last several decades, we've really made amazing strides in enhancing safety for patients.

So we have moved towards this zero harm concept, which really back when I started as a nurse seemed so far-fetched and maybe even an impossible goal.

But we really are showing that we can provide care in a way that is safe for patients and that we don't harm them.

Just this week, we celebrated our medical intensive care unit for 2,000 days without a CAUTI.

And a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the whole hospital for going one year without a CLABSI.

We used to think, oh, some patients will be harmed by care.

That's just how it goes.

But we are no longer accepting that because the reality is we can keep our patients safe.

That's high reliability.

And we talk about that every day in health care organizations.

But when we talk about high reliability and zero harm, we sometimes forget about one important group, and that's the clinicians.

And nurses are definitely included in that, a big part of that, but really all the clinicians that are working in healthcare.

Just like patients, clinicians deserve the reassurance that they will not be harmed just because they're inside of a hospital or a clinic or other type of healthcare organization.

So clinicians need just what you were talking about, this physical, psychological, and professional safety to be able to provide the kind of care that will then lead to the safe quality care that we want for our patients.

So where do you see, I mean, because I think nobody, no leader says like, oh, I don't care about safety of my nurses or clinicians.

So where do you see sort of the biggest disconnect between what leaders are sort of doing or thinking about when it comes to safety and what actually happens?

You know, I think a long time ago, we learned, you know, as part of some of those high reliability principles that we needed to have a reluctance to simplify.

That is a if you do high reliability, you know about that principle.

And that means that that, you know, that if something bad happens, it isn't just happening because of one person's error or one person's problem.