Center for Safety in Emergency Care

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This application proposes a multi-center, interdisciplinary Center for Safety in Emergency Care, a research consortium of the University of Florida, Dalhousie University, Northwestern University, and Brown University. The long-term objective of this effort is to produce a center that will grow to become a center of excellence in patient safety touching many disciplines in emergency care: medical, nursing, pre-hospital care, emergency departments, trauma centers, intensive care units, and cardiac arrest teams, for example. Emergency care is an important domain for safety research and improvement; roughly 100 million Americans seek care in emergency departments each year, and due to the cognitive and environmental demands of care in such settings, preventable errors occur at a higher rate in emergency care than they do in other settings. Such a center would play a role in health care similar to that played by the NASA Ames Research Center, the Air Safety Reporting System, and the NTSB in aviation. The center will develop expertise in four domains fundamental to patient safety research: the cognitive psychology of error and human performance; the clinical epidemiology of adverse events in emergency care; the use of information technology as error-reducing and performance enhancing aids; and the application of human factors engineering to improve safety in emergency care. It will have the capacity to research safety problems and interventions at multiple levels, such as the patient, the caregiver, individual, the task, the team, the environment, and the organization. Phase I of the project will consist of an organized planning process, aimed at assembling the critical elements of a successful research team. This process, which take to 12 to 18 months, will establish a shared vision of the center, identify strengths and areas of need, and develop and implement a strategy to address the areas of need, including both recruitment of domain experts and internal training to develop the relevant skills and expertise. Phase II will involve the design and execution of a pilot project by the research team built in Phase I.