Three of the eleven projects awarded to ESHPM in ZonMw's Safety II call

Safety II is a new approach in research into patient safety that focuses on the resilience of care teams and organisations. In Safety II, the focus lies not only on learning from the mistakes in, for example, incidents but also on learning from what is going well in daily practice.

Accountability processes in hospitals

The project of Dr Jan-Willem Weenink and Prof. Roland Bal, from research group Health Care Governance, focuses on accountability processes in hospitals. According to the Safety II approach, teams must obtain ‘space for resilience’, while the vertical accountability in hospitals is mostly traditionally organised. Teams currently account for their actions on the basis of guidelines and indicators that do not allow room for handling in context. In this project, we work together with the Elizabeth-TweeSteden Hospital (ETZ), Amphia Hospital and Leiden University Medical Center to rearrange vertical accountability and strengthen horizontal accountability.

The role of nurses

Health Management Services & Organisation, another research group, is participating in two projects. The first project, with VERVE, led by Dr Catharina van Oostveen and Dr Anne Marie Weggelaar-Jansen, concerns the role of nurses in expanding and ensuring patient safety. The aim of this study is to learn how they use nursing leadership to ensure the quality and safety, what works and what doesn’t work, and why, by analysing positive examples together with nurses from Treant, Spaarne Gasthuis and Radboud University Medical Center.

Transferring vulnerable children

Safe Transfer, the second project to receive funding, is led by Dr Martina Buljac and Prof. Kees Ahaus together with University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) and Pluut & Partners. Safe Transfer focuses on the transfer of vulnerable children from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in the UMCU to a second-tier hospital (e.g. ETZ, St. Antonius, Deventer). This project examines which aspects are essential for a safe but also timely transfer and how they can lead to a proactive, flexible and learning organisation. Timely and streamlined transfer of patients who no longer need ICU care is very important given the nationwide shortage of ICU nurses and the number of ICU beds.