A Research On The Influence Of Medical Error Reporting Willingness Based On The Trust Heuristic

Ensuring patient safety is an important part of hospital management and the foundation of improving medical service quality.Proactively reporting medical errors helps to learn from mistakes and prevent the same mistakes from happening again.Many medical institutions have established medical safety adverse event reporting systems to collect information on medical errors in time.However,medical staffs are usually reluctant to voluntarily report detected errors because error reporting exposes their own or others’ faults.The low reporting rate of medical staffs seriously hinders the prevention and control of adverse events,which is not conducive to the improvement of medical work quality.This study aims to explore the factors that affect the willingness of medical staff to report medical errors and the relationship among these factors.The trust heuristic from social risk research has effectively investigated the relationship between trust and willingness to accept new technologies and new systems.Thus,drawing upon the trust heuristic,we built a model that affects the willingness to report errors.An empirical analysis was carried out on 320 medical personnel from 19 provinces using snowball sampling.Smart-PLS structural model analysis and SPSS statistical software were used to analyze the results of the questionnaire.The results show that organizational trust and perceived benefits will positively affect the willingness to report,while perceived risks will negatively affect the willingness to report.Besides directly affecting the willingness to report,organizational trust can also indirectly affect the willingness through perceived risks and perceived benefits.The mediating effect of perceived benefit is stronger than that of perceived risk.The results indicate that cultivating medical staff’s trust in medical institutions can improve the rate of medical error reporting and the implementation of medical adverse event reporting system.Compared with reducing perceived risk,the method of improving perceived earnings is more effective in promoting the willingness to report errors.Our research provide theoretical guidance and decision support for medical institutions to improve the adverse event reporting system.It also have certain positive significance for the research of error management,patient safety and quality management.