Employees asked to complete Safety Culture Survey in January

Employees throughout Bridgeport, Greenwich and Yale New Haven hospitals and Northeast Medical Group will be asked to participate in a Yale New Haven Health System Safety Culture Survey Jan. 17 - 31 to measure their perceptions of the safety culture at their institutions. The anonymous survey, administered by the Advisory Board, will include questions about work environment in employees' departments and their hospital as a whole, how mistakes are handled, how safety events and near misses are reported, communication and other topics.

The survey should take about 10 minutes, and the survey link will be available on each of the intranets and on Employee Self Service. As in the past, there will be random drawings for incentive prizes for employees who have completed the survey throughout the two-week survey period in each organization. To enter, staff who have taken the survey can print a form, write their name and phone number on it, drop it in collection boxes on either campus and be eligible for regular drawings for gift cards and a final prize of an iPad.

"We have baseline results from the safety surveys we took in 2015 and 2013, and this is an effective method to measure how well our high reliability organization efforts are working," said Thomas Balcezak, MD, YNHH chief medical officer. "It's important to measure progress on our HRO journey, and this survey sheds a lot of light on how we perform in several domains. These include non-punitive response to error; openness and communication; staffing; feedback and communication about error; supervisor/manager expectations and actions promoting safety; and teamwork within hospital units."