Enhancing Occupational Health Safety: A Qualitative Study Using Condition Reports

Healthcare regulatory bodies require incident reporting and investigation as a way to identify operational hazards and shortcomings in safety. The goal of such reporting is to reduce factors that create unsafe conditions (OSHA, 2015). This often equates to finding problems and fixing them. Learning from errors is known to some researchers as Safety-I or improvement from learning from mistakes. Some research now suggests that there is more to be gained by learning from most healthcare episodes: the things that go right. The relationship between the old and new view of safety is sometimes proposed as one of substitution and sometimes as one of supplementation, but what is agreed upon is the underlying assumption that the complexity of current healthcare systems requires safety scientists to start thinking radically differently about how to create and sustain a safe and resilient healthcare system for patients (Pendersen, 2016). By emphasizing the importance of understanding the uncertainties and trade-offs in everyday work with its successes and failures, Safety-II offers a unique perspective on harm reduction in healthcare. Therefore, this qualitative study uses text data to examine and explore how condition reports advance Safety-II in occupational healthcare settings.