Safety learning feedback from incident reporting to physicians through social media

Project summary

Background

Considered a cornerstone of patient safety improvement efforts, incident reporting systems to capture information about hazards and adverse events to learn lessons that will help to prevent harm or the reoccurrence of similar events have been developed in several countries during the past decade. A crucial part of a reporting and learning system is its capability to provide feedback. The development of effective feedback from safety reporting and learning systems including corrective actions to improve safety and addressing specific systems’ vulnerabilities has been categorized as essential to improve reliability and safety in care delivery processes, but limited evidence exists concerning the issue of effective forms and mechanisms of safety feedback within healthcare. The perception among physicians of lack of feedback and follow-up of reported issues has been noted as a barrier for patient safety incident reporting, alongside obscurity as to what should be reported and fear of blame or repercussions.

Social media are increasingly being used in health as powerful communications tools currently used to improve reach, and promote campaign messages and organizations’ activities. However more research is required to measure the impact of social media on issue awareness and applicability to disseminate learning from safety feedback. Mathematical models can be used to help measure the reach and reaction to safety content when such information is disseminated through electronic social networks as such as Twitter. Mathematical description of patterns found in real-world data form the basis of models that can eventually be used to predict dissemination of learning from safety feedback through this route. However, viewpoints and preferences of physicians to interact and receive safety feedback via social media are not fully understood.

In the context of this background, the present research is being developed to establish physicians’ preferred mechanisms to receive safety feedback, content characteristics most likely to influence physicians’ change of practice, clinician profiling to match safety feedback to clinical needs, and appraising the outcomes of an intervention to disseminate safety feedback using social media platform pilot.

Aims

• To describe and investigate physicians’ preferences to receive safety feedback from national incident reporting
• To establish content characteristics of a dynamic safety feedback most likely to influence physicians’ change of practice
• To assess the potential for using social media to disseminate safety feedback to physicians 

Outputs

To come