Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for the Improvement of Healthcare Systems and Patient Safety

David Allison, CPPS, has 15+ years of facilitating RCA teams, and teaching RCA methodology for patient safety and risk management professionals. He has over 30 years of experience in healthcare and has provided leadership in behavioral health, risk management, and patient safety settings. David has been the process owner for the safety value stream across a healthcare system, helping to reduce the rate of serious safety events with tools such as RCA. Harold Peters, P.Eng., is an improvement professional with extensive experience in healthcare, service, government, and manufacturing. During his 15+ years in healthcare, he led Lean project and transformation work, facilitated RCAs, and introduced other improvement methodologies like Work Simplification, Theory of Constraints, and Operations Research. In system leadership roles, he established and led the process improvement strategy, structure, standards, and resources for two large healthcare systems across multiple states, and led the system patient safety department in one of the organizations, developing strategy, structure, standards, and teaching RCA methodologies.

Part 1: Building an Understanding of RCA. 1. The Need for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). 2. Forms of Analysis. 3. Pre-Work for an RCA Team Meeting. 4. Creating the Logic Tree. 5. Effective Action Plans. 6. RCA Facilitation. Part 2: Root Cause Analysis Champions. 7. RCA Standard Work by Role. 8. Barriers to RCA and Their Countermeasures. 9. Strategies for No Repeat Events. 10. Teaching RCA.