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:
- promoting and disseminating the successful experiences through the creation of a national web based archive allowing the dissemination of the experiences implemented at local/regional level and permitting all health organizations to learn from each other and so improving their own services;
- promoting the transfer of good practices at regional / national level;
- informing the users/citizens about the valuable and quality initiatives implemented to enhance patient inside the national territory, as well as explaining their impact.
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:
- Titles: contains the list of titles attributed to the experiences by the authors, with the indication of the Region of origin;
- Region: through a drop-down menu it is possible to select the Region in which to consult the experiences sent to the Observatory;
- Events: allows the research of experiences carried out for prevention and management of sentinel events and other events which, according to the literature, are considered most relevant; the list of events, shown in a drop-down menu, undergoes periodic updating;
- Recommendations: allows to search the experiences
which represent examples of implementation of the recommendations issued by the
Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Policy on the matter of prevention of sentinel
events prevention (there were eight recommendations at the closing date of the call for good practice 2008); the list is organized in
a drop-up menu and is updated following the enactment of new recommendations.
Consult the ministerial recommendations - More details are available on the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Policy website.
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:
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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). |
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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). |
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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.


