Sometimes in healthcare, things will go wrong. Whether it’s a medication error, retention of a medical instrument, wrong-site surgery, or any other patient harm event, unaddressed systemic faults can result in traumatizing events for patients and providers. When a patient is accidentally harmed by the care they receive, how would you expect the provider or the organization to respond? Traditionally, after an adverse event, a common response is denial and defensiveness where patients are left in the dark and oftentimes do not get to fully understand what happened to them unless they pursue litigation. Through building a thorough evidence base, Communication and Resolution Programs (CRPs) have shown to be a better response to patient harm for all parties involved.

In this episode of the Washington Patient Safety Coalition’s The New Wave of Healthcare podcast, we discuss the role of CRPs in advancing and improving patient safety. CRP is the best practice to responding to patient harm after an adverse event and is where the healthcare system on the national level is moving toward. Implementing CRP can be complex, but there are systems in place to support organizations in navigating the CRP

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