Healthcare Design - March 2018 - 41

The

Center

WA R N I N G S Y S T E M

The Center's Safety Risk Assessment toolkit
is designed to help users identify hazards and
mitigate risk within healthcare environments
By Ellen Taylor

HE FACILITY GUIDELINES Institute's (FGI) Guidelines
for Design and Construction requires healthcare organizations to develop a safety risk assessment to identify and mitigate hazards and risks of adverse events
for patients, staff, and visitors. The Center for Health
Design has a free tool to help guide you through the
process.
The Safety Risk Assessment (SRA) toolkit, funded
through a multiyear grant from the Agency for Healthcare Quality and
Research and created by safety risk experts, outlines a proactive process
for architects, designers, healthcare organizations, and safety advocates
to follow. It's designed to prompt discussion and encourage multidisciplinary teams to use an evidence-based design approach to identify solutions to six safety issues: infection, falls, medication errors, security risks,
injuries of behavioral health, and patient handling concerns.
The toolkit should be utilized as early in the design process as possible
to help guide decisions and is created in a way that doesn't require users to
have previous SRA knowledge or experience. Short tutorial videos, a user
guide, and a section on frequently asked questions and answers are also
included online.

G E T T I N G S TA R T E D

There are four basic steps to follow when using the toolkit:
* Begin by creating a profile that includes information about the project scope, safety areas to consider, and project team collaborators,
including subject matter experts, frontline
caregivers, administrators, designers, archiIT'S IMPORTANT THAT
tects, engineers, and other stakeholders. This
ALL STAKEHOLDERS HAVE
profile becomes the project "home page." It
can be used to provide documentation to an
A VOICE IN IDENTIFYING
authority having jurisdiction for project apTHE OPTIMAL SOLUTIONS
provals and houses links to many outside reFOR A PROJECT.
sources such as FGI's Patient Handling and
Movement Assessment white paper and its
Design Guide for the Built Environment of Behavioral Health Facilities.
* Next, enter historical safety data (such as the number of specific infections in a unit or fall incidents) to help identify where problems may exist and establish any trends that might be considered. This information
can be entered using an organization's existing numeric format for col-

lecting and reporting or via narrative.
* The Safety Alignment Tool will then assess
safety issues within the context of larger organizational objectives and quality improvement processes. This process helps outline
where an organization may need some additional work on improving safety and provides
an opportunity to align project objectives
with strategic objectives for safety. These
items can serve as an action list for the administrative team and can be marked as "in progress," "not started," or "well developed."
* In the final stage, design considerations for
the six safety areas are looked at together, individually, or by building component (such
as unit or room layout). These factors aren't a
checklist but a prompt for discussion so teams
can decide whether an item is applicable to a
project and then assign a high-level risk estimate, cost magnitude, and priority level. Rationale statements are also added here to help
teams understand why a consideration might
be important as well as any trade-offs or additional benefits that might be realized.
NEXT STEPS

Many project design choices are influenced by
the care model, operational policies and procedures, the staff, patients (and their family/visitors), and the built environment. Therefore, it's
important that all stakeholders have a voice in
identifying the optimal solutions for any given
project. What works for one project or organization may be vastly different for another.
The bottom line is that the SRA isn't about
checking off everything you've done and acing the test. It's about proactively considering
the implications of design and creating solutions that have been developed in a thoughtful manner.
For more information, visit the Safety Risk
Assessment toolkit on The Center's website at
www.healthdesign.org/SRA. 
Ellen Taylor, PhD, AIA, MBA, EDAC, is vice president for research at The Center for Health Design.
She can be reached at E T AY L O R @ H E A L T H
DESIGN.ORG.

MARCH 2018

http://www.healthdesign.org/SRA http://www.healthdesign.org/SRA

Healthcare Design - March 2018

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