New Mexico's Health Quality Improvement Organization

The Rural Organizational Safety Culture Change (ROSC) Project

The ROSC project focuses on assessing and improving the organizational climate for patient safety in rural and critical access hospitals. Eleven New Mexico hospitals have pledged to work with NMMRA to achieve this goal of improving patient safety.

To implement system changes, NMMRA:

Assesses a hospital’s organizational climate for patient safety
Provides an analysis and report of the assessment to senior leadership
Works with hospital leadership to develop and implement a plan to improve the safety of the organization
Coordinates a re-assessment after changes have been implemented

National Initiative

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) developed the Patient Safety Network. In an effort to raise awareness about patient safety issues, more than 600 hospitals nationwide are collecting data on the safety culture in their facilities and submitting this information to a central repository. The purpose of this repository is to have aggregate national averages and percentiles by bed size, teaching status, and other hospital characteristics to identify strengths and opportunities for patient safety culture improvement. This database, which includes New Mexico ROSC partner hospitals’ data, will be coordinated by and posted on the AHRQ Web site.

Participants in this project were selected from an applicant pool of New Mexico’s critical access and rural prospective payment system (PPS) hospitals.