Standardizing Patient Safety Event Reporting between Care Delivered or Purchased by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA)

Background: Increasing community care (CC) use by veterans has introduced new challenges in providing integrated care across the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and CC. VHA's well-recognized patient safety program has been particularly challenging for CC staff to adopt and implement. To standardize VHA safety practices across both settings, VHA implemented the Patient Safety Guidebook in 2018. The authors compared national- and facility-level trends in VHA and CC safety event reporting post-Guidebook implementation.

Methods: In this retrospective study using patient safety event data from VHA's event reporting system (2020-2022), the research team examined trends in patient safety events, adverse events, close calls (near misses), and recovery rates (ratio of close calls to adverse events plus close calls) in VHA and CC using linear regression models to determine whether the average changes in VHA and CC safety events at the national and facility levels per quarter were significant.

Results: A total of 499,332 safety events were reported in VHA and CC. Although VHA patient safety event trends were not significant (p > 0.05), there was a significant negative trend for adverse events (p = 0.02) and positive trends for close calls (p = 0.003) and recovery rates (p = 0.004). In CC there were significant negative trends for patient safety events and adverse events (p = 0.02) and a significant positive trend for recovery rates (p = 0.03). There was less variation in VHA than in CC facilities with significant decreases (for example, interquartile ranges in VHA and CC were 0.03 vs. 0.05, respectively).

Conclusion: Fluctuations in different safety events over time were likely due to the disruption of care caused by COVID-19 as well as organizational factors. Notably, the increases in recovery rates reflect less staff focus on harmful events and more attention to close calls (preventable events). Although safety practice adoption from VHA to CC was feasible, additional implementation strategies are needed to sustain standardized safety reporting across settings.