Practical Aspects of the Use of Healthcare Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Tool in The Risk Management of Pediatric Emergency Department: The Scrutiny in Iran

Aim: The Emergency Department is one of the most challenging wards of the hospital for studying patient safety and the prevention of treatment errors is the basic rule in the quality of health care. The present study was conducted to evaluate the selected risk processes of Pediatric Emergency of Qaem Educational Hospital in Mashhad by the Healthcare Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (HFMEA) methodology. Materials and Methods: A mixed method was used to analyze failure modes and their effects with HFMEA. Five high-risk processes of the Pediatric Emergency were identified and analyzed. To classify failure modes, nursing errors in clinical management model; for classifying factors affecting error, the approved model by the United Kingdom National Health System; and for determining solutions for improvement, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving was used. Results: In 5 selected processes, 28 steps, 80 sub-processes and 254 potential failure modes were identified with HFMEA. Thirty-seven (14.5%) failure modes as high-risk errors were detected and transferred to the decision tree. The most and the least failure modes were placed in the categories of care errors as 62.3%, and knowledge and skill as 8.1% respectively. Also, 23.6% of preventive measures were in the category of human resource management strategy. Conclusion: Using the proactive method of HFMEA for identifying the possible failure of treatment procedures, determining the effective cause on each failure mode and proposing the improvement strategies, has high efficiency and effectiveness.