Root cause analysis RCA is a process or technique used to identify the most fundamental reason or contributing causal factor as to why a problem occurred. It is a retrospective assessment, focused on finding vulnerabilities in the system and developing countermeasures. The process of RCA addresses four basic questions. 1. What happened? 2. Why did it happen? 3. What are the contributing causal factors? 4. What can we do to prevent it from happening again? The emphasis must be on developing effective countermeasures. The RCA team must be interdisciplinary in nature, involving experts from the front line who are closest to the safety process and who have the best ideas to solve the problem. RCA is a process that continually digs deeper by asking, “Why, why, why?” at each level of an event. It is a process that identifies changes that need to be made to systems, is as impartial as possible, and moves beyond blame. The RCA process must consider human factors and other factors, related processes, and systems, and analyze the underlying cause-and-effect relationships. Relevant literature must be reviewed during the process and internal consistency must be achieved. The RCA must identify risks and their potential contributions to safety errors, and must determine potential improvements in processes or systems. To be credible, an RCA must include the participation and support of the leadership of the organization and those most closely involved in the safety process and systems. Figure 55-1 is a flow diagram of an RCA team process. The following are five rules of causation adapted for patient safety from a publication by David Marx on the NCPS website, www.patientsafety.gov: Rule 1–Causal statements must clearly show the cause and effect relationship. This is simplest of the rules. When describing why an event occurred, show the link between the root cause and the bad outcome, and each link should be clear to the RCA team and others. Focus on showing the link from the root cause to the undesirable patient outcome under investigation. Even a statement such as “resident was fatigued” is deficient without adescription of how and why this led to a close call or mistake. The bottom line is that the reader needs to understand the logic in linking the cause to the effect. Rule 2–Negative adjectives such as poorly or inadequate are not used in causal statements. As humans, we try to make each job we have as easy as possible; unfortunately, this human tendency works its way into the heath care documentation process. We may shorten our findings by saying, “Maintenance manual was poorly written” when we really have a much more detailed explanation in mind. To force clear cause and effect descriptions and avoid inflammatory statements, do not use negative descriptors that are merely placeholders for more accurate, clear descriptions. Even words such as “carelessness” and “complacency” are bad choices, because they are broad, negative, judgments that do little to describe the actual conditions or behaviors that led to the mishap. Rule 3–Each human error must have a preceding cause. Most of our mishaps involve at least one human error. Unfortunately, the discovery that a human erred does little to aid the prevention process. Investigate to determine WHY the human error occurred. It can be a system-induced error, such as a step not included in the medical procedure or an at-risk behavior, such as doing task by memory, instead of with a checklist. For every human error in your causal chain, there must be a corresponding cause. The cause of the error, not the error itself, leads to productive prevention strategies. Rule 4–Each procedural deviation must have a preceding cause. Procedural violations are like errors, in that they are not directly manageable. Instead, we can manage the cause of the procedural violation. If a clinician is violating a procedure because it is a local norm, address the incentives that created the norm. If a technician is missing steps in a procedure because he is not aware of the formal checklist, improve education. Rule 5–Failure to act is only causal when there was a preexisting duty to act. We can all find scenarios in which our investigated mishap would not have occurred – but this is not the purpose of causal investigation. Instead, we need to find out why this mishap occurred in our system as it is designed. A doctor’s failure to prescribe a medication can only be causal if he is required to prescribe the medication initially. The duty to
perform may arise from standards and guidelines for practice or from other duties involving patient care.