The use of root cause analysis in American hospitals and its application on Chinese hospitals

As one of the main public health significances, safety and quality of healthcare used to be underestimated in China. In recent years, an increasing number of conflicts between physicians and patients in China brought a great concern of the terrible medical environment to the public. In this essay, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is introduced as a tool which works well in American hospital to create a safety and high-quality environment in the hospitals. The issue of how to apply this quality control tool into Chinese hospitals will also be discussed below.\ud RCA is a system-based approach to investigate and analyze an adverse event concentrating on the system defects other than human errors and to find out the root causal factors of the problems in the event. The aim of RCA is to create a preventative solution to the problem so that similar adverse events are likely to be avoided in the future.\ud In modern US hospitals, RCA is a major process for Patient Safety Officers to deal with nosocomial diseases and injuries. It also helps both administrators and clinicians in the hospital improve the quality of care at the system level. It is always the case that several issues from different procedures could be pushed to the surface by the RCA of a single event so that many problems can be solved simultaneously and efficiently. The hospitals in the United States, which are considered to have a good quality of health care among the world, are benefited much from this useful tool.\ud Since Chinese hospitals plan to improve their quality of care in a short time, RCA is a must-have tool to help them against a large number of medical errors and patients’ dissatisfactions. However, how Chinese hospitals apply RCA on Chinese situations may be a brand new field since the health care system in China is so different than it in the US. The possible applications and barriers of RCA use in China will also be discussed in this essay.\u