Collective engagement and focus are required to attain large system change. This plan centers on five goals to improve patient safety in Massachusetts: leadership and culture, operations and engagement, patient and family support, workforce wellbeing, and measurement and transparency. The document provides guidance for implementation of strategies targeting each goal to generate sustainable improvements.

Culture has been described as a key to establishing high reliability organizations. The National Quality Forum's Safe Practices for Healthcare and the Leapfrog Group both mandate hospitals to regularly assess their safety culture. This AHRQ Web site provides validated safety culture survey tools (Hospital, Medical Office, Nursing Home, Community Pharmacy, Ambulatory Surgery Center), user guides health care organizations can use to implement the surveys and a bibliography of articles discussing the use of SOPS in the field. Organizations can also use the AHRQ database to compare their Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) results. In addition, reports are available that summarize the benchmarking data across cohorts nationwide. An AHRQ WebM&M perspective discussed how to establish a safety culture.

The ability to raise patient safety concerns without fear of retribution is a core element of a safety culture. This pair of reports examines a failure in organizational response to an employee expressing concerns. The first report examines an explicit whistleblowing incident in the National Health Service that was poorly managed. The second looks at broader system-level elements needed to support effective responses when concerns are voiced.

Quality and safety work requires distinct competencies to support effective action and systemic approaches to improvement. This report highlights areas of emphasis and weakness across quality domains and the need for health organization leadership to train and direct designated staff to realize quality and safety goals.

The AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Community Pharmacy Survey and accompanying toolkit were developed to collect opinions of community pharmacy staff on the safety culture at their pharmacies.

Concerted effort has been undertaken to understand the impact of clinician burnout on patient safety. This report represents the culmination of a six-year effort to design a national multidisciplinary plan to address system issues that affect the wellbeing of clinicians. The plan highlights 7 priorities to focus effort to installing and sustaining workplace environments that support clinician health such as effective use of technology, commitment to diversity and inclusion, and support of mental health.