Exploring the Importance of Changing the Culture Within Healthcare Towards the Underreporting of Medical Errors: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The ethical dilemma for the healthcare industry is that although they strive to keep patients safe, the culture reflects an underreporting of medical errors. Because of this, healthcare leaders have strived relentlessly to create a positive patient safety culture. A positive patient safety culture alludes to traits within a company that permit patient safety to be a goal, including open reporting, a no blame environment to incident reporting, dedicated leadership, continuous companywide learning, and a take charge recognition of safety warnings.Despite the efforts to create this type of safety culture, based on findings within this study, the conclusion is that leaders within the healthcare community have failed to foster this form of culture. Because of this, the objective of this study was to explore the importance of changing the culture within healthcare towards the underreporting of medical errors. In terms of methodology used to explore a culture change, the researcher performed a literature review. As for the results towards addressing a culture change, the researcher identified three barriers. Thereafter, the researcher provided resolutions to overcome these barriers.