The Observatory on Good Practices for Patient Safety

The Observatory, specifically created for monitoring good practices, has begun its activity by launching a call for good practices. The Call was addressed to the Italian regional health authorities so that they could coordinate the collection of successful initiatives about clinical risk management and patient safety, carried out in each region.

The call for good practices 2008 intended to contribute to patient safety by:

The documentation currently available in this section represents the experiences submitted to the Observatory on Good Practices through the Regions’ coordination, answering the call for good practice 2008. It contains titles and persons to contact for further information. It is also possible to download the full text of each good practice submitted to the Observatory where the authors granted permission to publish.

The Observatory database is consultable using the following research criteria:

A text research tool allows users to search inside all the documents contained in the present section of the Agenas site for specific terms or phrases.

The experiences have been classified, in relation to the compliance of the submitted documentation to the criteria defined in the Call foor Good Practices 2008, into the following three categories:

logo buone pratiche Good practices: they represent cases that, according to the documentation submitted to the Observatory, clearly result in concluded experiences which fulfil all the criteria of the Call and, in particular, the evaluation is represented in quantitative terms (or qualitative but sufficiently detailed to permit an adequate comprehension of the results and of the processes).
logo buone pratiche potenziali Potential good practices: experiences which, according to an analysis of the documentation, are still in progress or partially respond to the other criteria of the Call (especially in relation to the evaluation of the results).
logo iniziative Initiatives: documentation characterized by essentiality which permits a partial understanding of the progression of the project and of the results achieved.

The splitting into Good Practices, Potential Good Practices, Initiatives is based on the documentation received in reply to the Call for Good Practices 2008 and is dynamic in nature; the monitoring of the improvement of the experiences is part of the activities of the Observatory. At the annual launching of the call for good practices updating and/or integrating the database documentation will be possible. This will permit the full understanding of the experiences carried out and of the results obtained.