Developing the PC PMOS, a Primary-Care Patient Measure Of Safety

Abstract

There is been an increasing awareness by health care providers, organisations and policy advisors that patient safety and quality is an important issue, since primary care is the first point of contact with the healthcare system for most patients. Patient safety is generally not considered to be a problem in primary care but there is evidence that this is not the case. Patient safety incidents have been predicted to occur from 2% [1] to 10% [2] of consultations. The majority of errors in primary care fall within the categories of medication errors [3], diagnostic errors [4] and communication errors [5]. Getting patient opinions is one approach to address these errors as evidence suggests that patients are able to identify potential primary-care errors [6–8]. Patients have a different perspective on safety and patient harm, and can provide insights to prevent errors [9, 10] as well as identify factors contributing to patient safety incidents [8, 11]. A questionnaire, the Patient Measure Of Safety (PMOS), has been developed to collect patient feedback on the factors contributing to safety incidents in secondary care [11, 12]. This was based around the Yorkshire Contributing Factors Framework [13] that identified 20 factors contributing to safety incidents. In primary care, however, patient feedback tends to focus on experience and satisfaction [14], or on after-event reporting and incident disclosure [15]. Patient-safety questionnaires for primary care do exist [16, 17] but no questionnaire has been explicitly developed that comprehensively measures factors contributing to patient safety-incidents. Health-care professionals in primary care could use patient feedback to improve safety in the same way health professionals do in hospital settings. Therefore, the principle aim of this study was to adapt the PMOS into a primary-care patient measure of safety (PC PMOS) questionnaire to be used as a basis for proactively managing safety and service improvement in the primary-care setting; and test the PC PMOS in regional general practices. Show more