Observation for assessment of clinician performance: a narrative review.

Arianna F. Yanes; Lisa M. McElroy; Zachary A. Abecassis; Jane L. Holl; Donna Woods; Daniela P. Ladner

Review

Observation for assessment of clinician performance: a narrative review.

November 11, 2015

Yanes AF, McElroy LM, Abecassis ZA, et al. BMJ Qual Saf. 2016;25(1):46-55.

View more articles from the same authors.

Observation has been used as a way to study opportunities for improvement in teamwork, practice, and guideline compliance. According to this review, observation was utilized most often in high-risk environments—like the emergency department—and helped to identify weaknesses in care processes. The authors also describe drawbacks to this method, such as the Hawthorne effect and the substantial resources required to train observers and data analyzers.

PubMed citation

Available at

Related Resources From the Same Author(s)

The use of technology for urgent clinician to clinician communications: a systematic review of the literature.

January 7, 2015

The role of technology in clinician-to-clinician communication.

August 14, 2013

Operating room to intensive care unit handoffs and the risks of patient harm.

July 22, 2015

Failure mode and effects analysis: a comparison of two common risk prioritisation methods.

May 4, 2016

High-alert medications in the pediatric intensive care unit.

January 7, 2009

Applying fault tree analysis to the prevention of wrong-site surgery.

March 11, 2015

Ambulatory care adverse events and preventable adverse events leading to a hospital admission.

April 18, 2007

Patient safety problems in adolescent medical care.

January 18, 2006

Adverse events and preventable adverse events in children.

March 6, 2005

Preventable errors in organ transplantation: an emerging patient safety issue?

July 11, 2012

Errors and the burden of errors: attitudes, perceptions, and the culture of safety in pediatric cardiac surgical teams.

April 30, 2008

Gaps in pediatric clinician communication and opportunities for improvement.

October 22, 2008

The importance of leadership in preventing healthcare–associated infection: results of a multisite qualitative study.

September 15, 2010

How active resisters and organizational constipators affect health care–acquired infection prevention efforts.

April 13, 2011

Education and reporting of diagnostic errors among physicians in internal medicine training programs.

September 19, 2018

Residents' duty hours—toward an empirical narrative.

December 5, 2012

What patients think doctors know: beliefs about provider knowledge as barriers to safe medication use.

August 14, 2013

Anatomy of a patient safety event: a pediatric patient safety taxonomy.

December 21, 2005

Minimizing Opioid Prescribing in Surgery (MOPiS) initiative: an analysis of implementation barriers.

April 17, 2019

Promoting patient safety through prospective risk identification: example from peri-operative care.

March 17, 2010

Relationship between state malpractice environment and quality of health care in the United States.

April 12, 2017

Effects of nurse staffing and nurse education on patient deaths in hospitals with different nurse work environments.

January 25, 2012

Risk assessment of the acute stroke diagnostic process using failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis.

March 1, 2023

Admission handoff communications: clinician's shared understanding of patient severity of illness and problems.

November 25, 2009

A randomized experimental study to assess the effect of language on medical students' anxiety due to uncertainty.

August 21, 2019

Communication discrepancies between physicians and hospitalized patients.

August 18, 2010

The nurse's role in the causation of compensable injury.

October 12, 2011

Addressing prehospital patient safety using the science of injury prevention and control.

November 5, 2008

Changes in efficiency and safety culture after integration of an I-PASS-supported handoff process.

February 3, 2016

What does safety commitment mean to leaders? A multi-method investigation.

April 3, 2019

National survey on the effect of oncology drug shortages on cancer care.

April 10, 2013

Verifying patient identity and site of surgery: improving compliance with protocol by audit and feedback.

January 14, 2009

Electronic health record usability issues and potential contribution to patient harm.

April 4, 2018

The high cost of low-frequency events: the anatomy and economics of surgical mishaps.

March 27, 2005

Year in review: medication mishaps in the elderly.

April 27, 2011

Using system analysis to build a safety culture: improving the reliability of epidural analgesia.

October 11, 2006

Do safety culture scores in nursing homes depend on job role and ownership? Results from a national survey.

October 4, 2017

"Everybody makes mistakes": children's views on medical errors and disclosure.

January 29, 2020

Association between surgeon technical skills and patient outcomes.

September 9, 2020

Regional surveillance of emergency-department visits for outpatient adverse drug events.

April 22, 2009

Association between hospital safety culture and surgical outcomes in a statewide surgical quality improvement collaborative.

May 15, 2019

Evaluation of the association between Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety culture (NHSOPS) measures and catheter-associated urinary tract infections: results of a national collaborative.

October 18, 2017

Potential drug interactions and duplicate prescriptions among cancer patients.

May 2, 2007

The impact of shift patterns on junior doctors' perceptions of fatigue, training, work/life balance and the role of social support.

December 22, 2010

Speaking up to reduce noise in the OR.

July 22, 2015

Critical phase distractions in anaesthesia and the sterile cockpit concept.

March 30, 2011

Optimization of drug–drug interaction alert rules in a pediatric hospital's electronic health record system using a visual analytics dashboard.

December 10, 2014

Bundle interventions used to reduce prescribing and administration errors in hospitalized children: a systematic review.

May 25, 2016

Facility-level variation in potentially inappropriate prescribing for older veterans.

August 15, 2012

Overrides of medication-related clinical decision support alerts in outpatients.

January 8, 2014

Using HFMEA to assess potential for patient harm from tubing misconnections.

June 28, 2006

Paradoxical effects of a hospital-based, multi-intervention programme aimed at reducing medication round interruptions.

June 13, 2012

A paradigm shift to balance safety and quality in pediatric pain management.

March 6, 2013

How will it work? A qualitative study of strategic stakeholders' accounts of a patient safety initiative.

March 10, 2010

Preserving organizational resilience, patient safety, and staff retention during COVID-19 requires a holistic consideration of the psychological safety of healthcare workers

July 8, 2020

Interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance in patient care.

September 1, 2017

Patients' concerns about medical errors during hospitalization.

January 3, 2007

Reality check for checklists.

August 19, 2009

Improving patient safety by repeating (read-back) telephone reports of critical information.

March 6, 2005

Insulin pump risks and benefits: a clinical appraisal of pump safety standards, adverse event reporting, and research needs: a joint statement of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes and the American Diabetes Association Diabetes Technology Working Group.

May 6, 2015

Compliance to technical guidelines for radiotherapy treatment in relation to patient safety.

May 19, 2010

A comprehensive obstetrics patient safety program improves safety climate and culture.

April 20, 2011

Varying rates of patient identity verification when using computerized provider order entry.

May 27, 2020

Clinical features and preventability of delayed diagnosis of pediatric appendicitis.

September 29, 2021

An electronic health record–based real-time analytics program for patient safety surveillance and improvement.

December 5, 2018

Debriefing to improve interprofessional teamwork in the operating room: a systematic review.

March 6, 2024

Health outcomes associated with potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults.

April 2, 2008

The influence of organizational context on quality improvement and patient safety efforts in infection prevention: a multi-center qualitative study.

November 10, 2010

Safe medication prescribing: training and experience of medical students and housestaff at a large teaching hospital.

July 13, 2005

Reductions in sepsis mortality and costs after design and implementation of a nurse-based early recognition and response program.

November 11, 2015

Rapid response systems: identification and management of the "prearrest state."

February 1, 2012

Error disclosure and family members' reactions: does the type of error really matter?

February 18, 2015

Do written disclosures of serious events increase risk of malpractice claims? One health care system's experience.

May 30, 2018

Wellbeing, burnout, and safe practice among healthcare professionals: predictive influences of mindfulness, values, and self-compassion.

June 8, 2022

Development of an instrument to measure the unintended consequences of EHRs.

April 8, 2015

Assessing system failures in operating rooms and intensive care units.

March 7, 2007

The heart of darkness: the impact of perceived mistakes on physicians.

March 6, 2005

Interruptions and geographic challenges to nurses' cognitive workload.

July 1, 2009

Failure to rescue following emergency surgery: a FRAM analysis of the management of the deteriorating patient.

February 2, 2022

Promoting a culture of safety as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review.

March 13, 2013

Optimizing the patient handoff between EMS and the emergency department.

September 17, 2014

An evaluation of hand hygiene in an intensive care unit: are visitors a potential vector for pathogens?

June 24, 2015

Introductions during time-outs: do surgical team members know one another's names?

May 24, 2017

Drug selection errors in relation to medication labels: a simulation study.

October 24, 2007

Beyond the corrective action hierarchy: a systems approach to organizational change.

August 26, 2020

Sex and gender differences in anesthesia: relevant also for perioperative safety?

April 7, 2021

Improving adverse drug event detection in critically ill patients through screening intensive care unit transfer summaries.

July 31, 2013

Notification of abnormal lab test results in an electronic medical record: do any safety concerns remain?

March 17, 2010

Unit of measurement used and parent medication dosing errors.

July 30, 2014

Improving communication with primary care physicians at the time of hospital discharge.

February 8, 2017

Eliminating adverse drug events at Ascension Health.

September 12, 2007

A simulation design for research evaluating safety innovations in anaesthesia.

January 28, 2009

Patient concerns about medical errors in emergency departments.

March 6, 2005

Sustaining innovations in complex health care environments: a multiple-case study of rapid response teams.

April 15, 2020

Safe prescribing: an educational intervention for medical students.

July 19, 2006

National Patient Safety Foundation agenda for research and development in patient safety.

March 27, 2005

Electronic health record legal settlements in the US since the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.

December 21, 2022

Are incorrectly used drugs more frequently involved in adverse drug reactions? A prospective study.

May 4, 2005

Use of high-fidelity simulation to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration and reduce patient falls.

May 10, 2017

Detection of missed fractures of hand and forearm in whole-body CT in a blinded reassessment.

September 29, 2021

Related Resources

What and when to debrief: a scoping review examining interprofessional clinical debriefing.

January 24, 2024

Changing the patient safety mindset: can safety cases help?

December 20, 2023

Physician engagement in organisational patient safety through the implementation of a Medical Safety Huddle initiative: a qualitative study.

August 9, 2023

Voices from the Frontlines of Health Care Safety.

May 31, 2023

Multispecialty physician online survey reveals that burnout related to adverse event involvement may be mitigated by peer support.

May 18, 2022

Patient Safety Primers

Debriefing for Clinical Learning

November 18, 2021

Evolving factors in hospital safety: a systematic review and meta-analysis of hospital adverse events.

September 29, 2021

Knowledge, attitudes, and expectations of medical staff toward medical error management policies in humanitarian medicine: a qualitative study.

February 10, 2021

Systems approach to health service design, delivery and improvement: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

February 3, 2021

How communication "failed" or "saved the day": counterfactual accounts of medical errors.

February 3, 2021

Scoping review of patients' attitudes about their role and behaviours to ensure safe care at the direct care level.

August 26, 2020

COVID-19: peer support and crisis communication strategies to promote institutional resilience.

April 22, 2020

Design and impact of a novel surgery-specific second victim peer support program.

January 29, 2020

Patients' conceptualizations of responsibility for healthcare: a typology for understanding differing attributions in the context of patient safety.

June 5, 2019

Deny, Dismiss, Dehumanise: What Happened When I Went to Hospital.

May 1, 2019

What words convey: the potential for patient narratives to inform quality improvement.

April 24, 2019

Hospital infection prevention: how much can we prevent and how hard should we try?

March 6, 2019

Quality improvement and safety in pediatric emergency medicine.

March 6, 2019

Understanding the knowledge gaps in whistleblowing and speaking up in health care: narrative reviews of the research literature and formal inquiries, a legal analysis and stakeholder interviews.

September 19, 2018

Peer support in anesthesia: turning war stories into wellness.

August 15, 2018

Transforming concepts in patient safety: a progress report.

August 1, 2018

Patient safety vulnerabilities for children with intellectual disability in hospital: a systematic review and narrative synthesis.

April 25, 2018

When clinicians drop out and start over after adverse events.

March 14, 2018

Are quality improvement collaboratives effective? A systematic review.

January 10, 2018

Effects of efforts to optimise morbidity and mortality rounds to serve contemporary quality improvement and educational goals: a systematic review.

December 20, 2017

A review of best practices for intravenous push medication administration.

December 20, 2017

A narrative review of the safety concerns of deprescribing in older adults and strategies to mitigate potential harms.

November 29, 2017

Opioid addiction is the biggest drug epidemic in U.S. history. How'd we get here?

October 18, 2017

Why do people stop taking their meds? Cost is just one reason.

September 20, 2017

Piece of my mind. Stories doctors tell.

July 19, 2017

See More About The Topic

Hospitals

Health Care Executives and Administrators

Medicine

Epidemiology of Errors and Adverse Events

Quality Improvement Strategies

Observation for assessment of clinician performance: a narrative review.

Debriefing for Clinical Learning

Connect With Us

Sign up for Email Updates

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Observation for assessment of clinician performance: a narrative review.

Debriefing for Clinical Learning

Connect With Us

Sign up for Email Updates

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Submit Your Innovations

Continue as a Guest

Continue Logged In

Submit Your Innovations

Continue as a Guest

Continue logged in

New Users to the PSNet site