The Safety Management System: Implementation for Nuclear Medicine

Abstract

In the Netherlands, 5.7% of the 1.3 million people in hospitals suffer from unintended damage to health, which – in the majority of cases – can be explained by human factors such as knowledge, behaviors, or skills. Reduction of this unintentional and avoidable damage is highly necessary. A safety management system (SMS) embeds patient safety in healthcare practice. Using this system, hospitals continuously identify risks, implement improvements, and establish, evaluate, and modify policy. The healthcare inspectorate has the supervising role to control the (progress of) implementation of the SMS themes in all Dutch hospitals.

Demonstrable patient safety in each healthcare processes is a task for every employee. Compliance to the system and if necessary adjustment of agreements make the full circle of plan-do-check-act round.

This chapter focuses on the development of the SMS in general, the implementation of ten safety themes in our university medical center, and application of the three most important safety themes on the department of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.