Using Fuzzy FMEA to Increase Patient Safety in Fundamental Processes of Operating Room

Abstract

Risk assessment is a standard tool in health care systems which is used to improve patient safety. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) as a powerful risk assessment tool for safety and reliability widely applied by industries such as aerospace, nuclear, automotive, chemical, mechanical, medical technologies, and electronics. FMEA is popular technique, but it has some substantial deficiencies. In this paper, fuzzy logic is employed to overcome these shortages. The proposed methodology extended to five fundamental processes of operating room (OR): (1) patient admission in the operating room; (2) patient transmission intothe operating room; (3) operating room, washing; (4) request for equipment repair in the operating room and (5) request for medical and pharmaceutical products.The FMEA team suggested corrective actions for failures with risk priority number (RPN) greater than 4.To observe the effectiveness of corrective action; two months after implementation of corrective actions, RPN was calculated, and results showed 8.23 percent reduction averagely.