The Development of Patient Safety Indicators for Critically Ill Patients Admitted to the Intensive Care Unit

Date
2020-07-09
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Abstract
Patient safety is a top priority in critical care. Patient safety indicators (PSIs) have been developed to measure critical care safety. Despite several approaches have been used to develop PSIs (deductive, inductive, and joint approach), PSIs are widely applied to measure the care performance in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). The overall objective of this thesis was to use a joint approach to develop a PSI that can be used to evaluate the safety of critical care and to assess the reliability and validity of this PSI. Three studies were conducted to achieve this objective. In the first study, we systematically reviewed the literature of PSIs proposed for patients admitted to an ICU. Heterogeneity of PSI definitions were observed. Among 44 unique PSIs identified from 21 studies, reliability and validity of four PSIs was only reported in one study. In the second study, a panel of ICU experts evaluated the 44 unique PSIs identified in our systematic review. The expert panel proposed an additional 20 PSIs and, during a second round, evaluated and prioritized the 64 PSIs using a modified RAND Appropriateness Method. The top ten ranked PSIs included clinically important concepts that had data available in a local electronic database. This included patient falls, which we investigated in our final study. In the third study, we constructed a fall risk predictive model leveraging provincial electronic medical record (EMR) and examined its reliability and validity. Overall, fall incidence rate was 1.55 (95% CI 1.36-1.76) per 1,000 patient days. The model displayed an excellent discrimination (AUC 0.82) and calibration. We propose the definition of Risk-adjusted Standardized Fall Rate (RSFR) to compared critical care performance across sites and overtime in order to test effectiveness of quality improvement strategies. RSFR demonstrates good test re-test reliability (r=0.662) and construct validity (r=0.533). The study proposed PSI for patient falls was developed from a comprehensive systematic review of the literature, structured expert panel review of candidate PSIs, and validated using a local EMR database. The main findings of this thesis support RSFR could be measured and monitored provincially or nationally to benchmark critical care safety performance.
Description
Keywords
Patient Safety Indicator, Intensive Care Medicine, Care Quality
Citation
Wu, G. (2020). The Development of Patient Safety Indicators for Critically Ill Patients Admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.