OUH’s priority is ”Patient First” – also when it comes to patient safety.

Quality of care and the safety of patients are core values of OUH. It is a guiding principle at OUH to have a patient-centered proactive culture where patient safety is essential and is continuously developed and improved.

Each day patients are treated at OUH in well-coordinated processes, where the staff is providing services of a very high quality and with focus on patient safety. However, occasionally things do not go as planned and errors may occur. OUH wants to learn from these errors, in order to ensure that they do not happen again. This work is mainly based on a well-functioning reporting system for adverse events. The adverse events at the hospital are primarily reported by staff but some patients and relatives do also report adverse events in order to contribute to patient safety procedures.

At OUH, all departments work actively with the reported adverse events as well as with areas of organizational focus as described in the OUH Patient Safety Strategy 2015-2018.

OUH promotes a ‘no blame’ culture which ensures that the focus is on learning from adverse events in order to build up resilient systems – rather than focus on blame. The key words in patient safety are: Openness, Trust and Learning.

In 2018 OUH will open a new research unit which will focus on how to improve patient safety at OUH.