High Reliability Organizations

There has been a great deal of discussion recently about healthcare adopting the same approaches that have facilitated high reliability organisations to achieve exceptional levels of safety despite operating in high risk high consequence environments. Examples include aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, the nuclear power industry and aviation.
What are the features of a high reliability organisation? Are these concepts translatable to healthcare? Are there any examples of HROs in healthcare?

There are according to one expert in the field five characteristics of HROs.

•Preoccupation with failure rather than success; this is self explanatory. The HRO almost celebrates failure and actively seeks it out recognising that only by recognising the defects within it's systems can it seek to rectify those defects.
•Reluctance to simplify interpretations; always seeking the explanation especially the explanation that defines the cause of a possible future mistake.
•Sensitivity to operations; To be sensitive to operations, we must monitor a messy reality and respond to the unexpected.
•Commitment to resilience; HROs recognize that not every risk can be mitigated, but anticipate failure and ensure that redundancy is built into the system.
•Deference to expertise; instead of hierarchy structures determining responses, the decision making in a HRO migrates to the persons with most expertise in that area.

The key difference between HROs and other organisations is that they respond differently to what others would consider signals of no significance. Mindfulness is what some have described this aspect, the capability to respond strongly to weak signals and respond strongly to mitigate the potential adverse consequences of such a failure. An example in healthcare might be the test result that is delayed, a routine test of no significance but this is a warning that the system is prone to error, that a time critical result may also be delayed. The HRO responds immediately to address this failure, the Low Reliability Organisation (LRO), effectively all of healthcare, is unlikely to take any action. HROs are constantly looking for evidence of failure or potential failure. Clearly these concepts can be applied to healthcare, though the details are likely to differ. However, it is likely that the only organisation which will successfully make this transition will be those in which the culture is receptive, indeed greedy, to make this change, and in which the leadership see becoming a HRO as the number one priority of the organization. This is such a fundamental shift that it likely that very few organizations will be successful in their attempts to become HROs.

I asked two physicians recently, world experts in safety and who lead the safety/ quality efforts in their hospital, which is probably the most advanced hospital in the world in this field, where their institution was on a 1-10 scale in safety. About a 3-4 on a good day they replied. That is the characteristic of a hospital that is striving to be the best and safest in the world, but recognises that despite being the best, it has a long journey ahead.

This book is probably one of the seminal works describing HROs, and I recommend it highly. Weick & Sutcliffe