What are hospitals and primary care doing to mitigate the social impact of serious adverse events

Abstract

Objective: To explore what hospitals and primary care (PC) are doing to reduce the negative social impact of a serious adverse event (AE). Methods: We surveyed 195 hospital (n =113) and PC (n= 82) managers from eight autonomous communities to explore the level of implementation of five interventions recommended after an AE to protect the reputation of healthcare institutions. Results: Most institutions (70, 45.2% PC, and 85, 54.8% hospitals) did not have a crisis plan to protect their reputation after an AE. Internal (p = 0.0001) and external (p = 0.012) communications were addressed better in PC than in hospitals. Very few institutions had defined the managers' role in case of an AE (10.7% hospitals versus 6.25% PC). Conclusion: A majority of healthcare institutions have not planned crisis intervention after an AE with severe consequences nor have they defined plans to recover citizens' trust after an AE. (C) 2016 SESPAS. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.orgilicenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).