Learning from Errors in Hospitals: Implications for Performance and Suboptimal Care in Medical Departments

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, the Romanian health care system has been struggling with a never-ending reform process aiming at improving its performance as a whole. A way to improve organizational performance is through collective learning – by exploiting organizations past experiences as learning opportunities. This study investigates the relationship between collective learning practices, namely, communication and analysis of errors, and performance, and suboptimal care in medical departments. Survey data were collected from a sample of 946 health professionals in two county hospitals in Transylvania. The mean age of the participants is 38.91 (σ = 9.93), and most of participants are nurses (68%). Results indicate that communication and analysis of errors in medical departments is positively associated with performance (β = .365, p< .01) and negatively associated with suboptimal care behaviours (B = -.245, p<.01), after controlling for the effect of age, sex, organizational position and job demands. Results have implications for initiatives aiming at improving the performance of medical organizations, by stressing the role of human resources development and teamwork as important assets for success. They also stress the role of bottom-up, as opposed to top-down interventions, in improving medical performance and the quality of the medical care provided to patients.