Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for the Improvement of Healthcare Systems and Patient Safety

The book follows a proven training outline, including real-life examples and exercises, to teach healthcare professionals and students how to lead effective and successful Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to eliminate patient harm.

This book discusses the need for RCA in the healthcare sector, providing practical advice for its facilitation. It addresses when to use RCA, how to create effective RCA action plans, and how to prevent common RCA failures. An RCA training curriculum is also included.

This book is intended for those leading RCAs of patient harm events, leaders, students, and patient safety advocates who are interested in gaining more knowledge about RCA in healthcare.

David Allison, CPPS, has 15+ years of facilitating RCA teams, and teaching RCA methodology for patient safety and risk management professionals. He has over 30 years of experience in healthcare and has provided leadership in behavioral health, risk management, and patient safety settings. David has been the process owner for the safety value stream across a healthcare system, helping to reduce the rate of serious safety events with tools such as RCA.

Harold Peters, P.Eng., is an improvement professional with extensive experience in healthcare, service, government, and manufacturing. During his 15+ years in healthcare, he led Lean project and transformation work, facilitated RCAs, and introduced other improvement methodologies like Work Simplification, Theory of Constraints, and Operations Research. In system leadership roles, he established and led the process improvement strategy, structure, standards, and resources for two large healthcare systems across multiple states, and led the system patient safety department in one of the organizations, developing strategy, structure, standards, and teaching RCA methodologies.