Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a powerful performance improvement tool used in patient safety programs to identify the underlying cause of a medical error or adverse event and to formulate a comprehensive action plan to prevent its recurrence. The goal of the RCA is to learn from a medical error or serious patient occurrence – ultimately to improve facility operations and patient safety in order to prevent such errors from recurring.

The GNYHA RCA training utilizes a systems approach to preventing medical errors and provides health care workers with a fundamental understanding of why and how errors occur as well as the skills necessary to identify the root causes of error.

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), a proactive risk-assessment process and another powerful process improvement tool is also presented in summary form during the RCA training.

Project Contact: Lorraine Ryan