Systematically Seeking Clinicians’ Insights to Identify New Safety Measures for Intensive Care Units and General Surgery Services

Comprehensive measures to benchmark or track safety performance do not yet exist. The authors aimed to develop and validate a process to identify comprehensive, clinically meaningful sets of safety measures that would draw on the clinical experiences and perceptions of active practitioners. They pilot tested this process for safety measure development for 2 hospital departments (ie, intensive care units and general surgery services) by holding 7 brainstorming sessions with physicians and nurses in major academic and community teaching hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts, and Baltimore, Maryland. Participants identified lists of patient harms that they considered to be among the 20 most frequent and the 20 most severe in their respective units. The authors generated a master list of patient harms, which participants then ranked by both frequency and severity via E-mail voting. This process produced safety measures with inherent credibility with clinicians on the front lines of care.