The second semester of the Master's program in Healthcare Management spent the second half of the semester in Alicante, Spain, to complete their module on quality, risk and business continuity management as part of the PROTECT Summer School. The Summer School took place as part of the ERASMUS+ Blended Intensive Program.
Students and teachers from Spain, Portugal, Germany and Finland dedicated this week to the central methods of clinical risk management. Various scenarios were worked on, including the fictitious Sacred Heart Hospital, which was inadequately prepared for a mass casualty incident. This scenario was worked on by several small groups as a scenario analysis. Process risk analysis was also addressed by considering the process for responding to cardiac arrest at the fictitious Sacred Heart Hospital. The London Protocol was also discussed.
Special thanks go to the host, Prof. Dr. José Mira, and his team from the Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche, who made an exciting program and an enriching exchange possible.

The first training school of the EU-COST-Action 22152 BetterCare, of which Reinhard Strametz, director of  WiHelP, is vice chair, took place from September 18 to 20, 2024. It was planned and led by the coordinator of the WiHelP, Victoria Klemm. The Training School was held at the NOVA National School of Public Health in Lisbon, Portugal. A total of 30 people from 19 different countries participated. The Training School is a major step in disseminating the findings of BetterCare and bringing together researchers from different countries to address the important topic of supporting informal caregivers. To make this possible, two keynote speeches were given on the topic of patient safety in the context of home care, and various group work sessions were held to create a deeper understanding of the situation of those affected. The Training School was rounded off with VR scenarios that addressed medication safety in the home setting.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new study on the economic importance of the Peer Support Program (PSP) in German hospitals. The authors of this study are Hannah Rösner (co-opted member of WiHelP), Reinhard Strametz (Institute Director), Thomas Neusius (member of WiHelP) and José Mira.

Key messages of the study:

    Economic benefit: Cost savings of €6,672 on average per nurse through the PSP for a hospital with 1,000 nurses.
    Total savings: Annual savings of approximately €6.67 million for a hospital with 1,000 nursing staff.
    Reduced absenteeism: Reduction in sick days and staff turnover.

Hospitals benefit from the PSP not only financially, but also through higher employee satisfaction, lower staff turnover and improved patient care. In addition, the psychological safety of employees is strengthened, which improves the quality of patient care in the long term. Comparable cost savings are also possible for many other professional groups, and further analyses are already underway. If you would like to find out more about the study, click here.

On October 26, 2023, two members of WiHelP were elected to leadership positions in an EU-COST Action. EU-COST-Actions are research networks funded by the EU, in which researchers from the pan-European area jointly research relevant topics of science and technology and develop solution strategies. The EU-COST-Action CA22152 "BETTERCARE" deals with the increasingly important topic of care in the home setting and possible mistakes that family caregivers can make and the associated effects on non-professional caregivers. These effects can ultimately negatively affect family members in need of care. With current demographic trends, this is an issue that will affect an increasing number of people across Europe. The focus of this European research action is to support non-professional caregivers, which can make a major contribution to patient safety and should enable those in need of care to remain in their home environment for as long as possible. Reinhard Strametz (Head of WiHelP) has been elected Vice-Chair and Victoria Klemm (Coordinator of WiHelP) has been elected Coordinator of the Training Schools. Thus, Victoria Klemm is not only the first female, but also the first young researcher at RheinMain UAS to hold a leading position in an EU-COST-Action. For Reinhard Strametz, this is the second EU-COST Action he is leading as Vice-Chair and a way to consolidate his work in the ERNST consortium (European Researchers' Network Working on Second Victims).

WiHelP welcomes this initiative and congratulates on this success!

From August 28th to 30th 2023, the most important congress on quality of care and patient safety in health care, organized by the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), took place in Seoul.

Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm were able to present two projects of the WiHelP: Safe@KCH, a project between the WiHelP and the Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) in Lilongwe, Malawi, was established within the framework of the funding programme Clinic Partnerships of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Else-Kröner-Fresenius-Foundation (EKFS), implemented by the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The project was able to bring about some positive changes for patient safety at KCH, for example through the sustainable procurement of patient identification bracelets in Malawi. These and other positive developments were presented at ISQua 2023 together with two delegates from Malawi.

Also presented were the results of the SeViD project so far, which brings new insights into the Second Victim Phenomenon (SVP) in Germany with its first national cross-sectional studies.

We are pleased to have successfully presented two projects in Seoul.

Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm at the EHMA conference
From June 04th to 07th 2023 the conference of the European Health Management Association (EHMA) took place in Rome. Around the topic of sustainable management, new research results were presented there in the context of workshops, abstract sessions or key note lectures followed by a discussion round.

Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm were on site as members of WiHelP to participate in the exciting offers on the one hand and to present their own results on the other hand. The topic of their presentation was the Second Victim Phenomenon in Germany, where they summarized the previous results of Prof. Reinhard Strametz' SeViD studies.

Dissemination of results is an important step to be able to implement measures against the Second Victim Phenomenon, which is why the participation in this conference was a good contribution to this.

The WiHelP congratulates them on their successful presentation!

On May 16, 2023, Victoria Klemm, the institute coordinator, was awarded the prize of the "Betriebswirtschaftliche Gesellschaft Wiesbaden" (Economic Association Wiesbaden, BGW) for outstanding academic achievements. The laudation for Victoria Klemm was held by Prof. Reinhard Strametz. The institute directors Prof. Reinhard Strametz and Prof. Silke Arnegger congratulate her warmly on this achievement. Click here for the official press release of RheinMain University.

Plusminus reported on 10.05.2023 about the dramatic situation of the workload of young physicians in German hospitals. The working hours are so high that a large proportion of those affected can only keep themselves fit for work with the help of medication, and more than half report burnout symptoms in surveys. As an expert in patient safety, Prof. Dr. Strametz was interviewed on this subject by WDR in Cologne. The video report is available in the media library under the following link.

On May 11th, 2023 the Austrian Platform Patient Safety and the association Second Victim invited to the Action Day Second Victim in the historic van Swieten Hall of the Medical University of Vienna to draw attention to this important topic as well as possible solutions and best practice examples. WiHelP was also represented by Prof. Reinhard Strametz, the director of the institute, and the two research assistants and members Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm. While Prof. Strametz informed with his introductory lecture about the basic problems of the Second Victim phenomenon, Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm were able to present the first results of the SeViD-A1 study among Austrian pediatricians, which was conducted in cooperation with the Second Victim Association and the Austrian Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The "Collegial Help" (KoHi) project of Elisabeth Krommer was also reported on, a best practice example of how Second Victims can be systematically supported. WiHelP is not uninvolved here either, in that the scientific evaluation of the project was carried out in Wiesbaden.

The event was rounded off by an exciting panel discussion with representatives of the various interest groups in the health care sector, in which different perspectives and possible solutions were clarified. What is clear is that in order to deal with this important health care problem, joint efforts and a lot of public relations work are needed to create sufficient awareness. The Second Victim Action Day in Vienna was a successful start to this.

f.l.t.r.: Hannah Rösner, Victoria Klemm, Prof. Reinhard Strametz, Dr. Eva Potura

The European Researchers' Network Working on Second Victims, established in 2020 as EU COST Action 19113, met on 09.05.2023 at the EU COST building in Brussels to drive further actions at European level aiming at improving mental safety of health professionals across Europe, following the adoption of the world's first definition of second victim. Best practice approaches from other high-risk sectors such as aviation, law enforcement or rail transport were also analyzed. The initiative, led by Prof. Dr. José Mira from Spain and Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz from WiHelP, has now been joined by researchers from 29 EU countries and 38 countries worldwide.

On 27 and 28.04.2023, the second meeting of the German-speaking Network for Patient Safety Research (DNPF) took place at the Frankfurt House of Logistics and Mobility (HOLM). Prof. Reinhard Strametz, as a founding member of the DNPF and institute director of WiHelP, invited various patient safety researchers to Frankfurt. The meeting was dedicated to the work of the Frankfurt poet Goethe "Dichtung und Wahrheit" (Poetry and Truth): How can scientific findings be better implemented in practice?

After a short round of introductions and a summary of the events of the past year, the participants of the network meeting entered directly into a lively discussion about why there is still a lack of implementation of scientific findings. Constructive, solution-oriented approaches were developed on how the implementation could be improved.

There were also several exciting presentations, which introduced research topics of individual participants and offered an exciting exchange.

Prof. Reinhard Strametz summarized the network meeting appropriately: "What we hoped for was a constructive exchange across institutions, disciplines and professions - and we succeeded".

In addition to Prof. Reinhard Strametz, Hannah Rösner, Eva Neckov and Victoria Klemm were also involved in this network meeting as members of WiHelP. WiHelP is pleased to have hosted this important network meeting.

The director of the Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Economics and Patient Safety (WiHelP) completed his habilitation in anesthesiology yesterday on the topic of "Employee Safety in Clinical Acute Medicine with Special Appreciation Employee Safety in Clinical Acute Medicine with Special Appreciation of the Second Victim Phenomenon" and the associated teaching qualification for the field at the Department of Medicine at Goethe University Frankfurt. The research work submitted for the cumulative habilitation dealt with research into the second victim phenomenon by creating and validating suitable measuring instruments and empirically investigating the prevalence, symptomatology and course of this phenomenon in German-speaking countries. In this context, worldwide first surveys on the awareness of the term per se were conducted and certain risk factors and barriers to implementation were identified together with researchers from leading health care institutions in Germany and Austria. This work will enable evidence-based and needs-based resilience building services for health professionals, who have been exposed to severe stresses not only since the COVID19 pandemic. The WiHelP congratulates Prof. Dr. med. habil. Reinhard Strametz for this academic honor!

The European Patient Safety Foundation (EUPSF) is an independent, non-profit foundation. It is a neutral platform for the exchange of knowledge and best practices for innovative, meaningful sustainable and replicable solutions to improve patient safety.

The EUPSF is multidisciplinary in nature and takes into account the specificities and importance of differences in the culture and functioning of healthcare systems in different European countries. It supports and collaborates with national/local patient safety stakeholders based on a strong, constant and open dialogue.

WiHelP, together with Klinikum Rechts der Isar in Munich, was the first academic institution from Germany to join EUPSF as a non-profit organization Affiliate. Already during the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of WiHelP, Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz supported the EUPSF with a podcast about the Second Victim phenomenon, listen here:  Link (https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-5qemr-eb9bca?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share).

"We look forward to collaborating with the EUPSF on content, which will help our international focus and networking for mutual benefit," said Prof. Strametz. More information about the EUPSF can be found here.

Like any effective measure, digital transformation in healthcare also offers opportunities and risks for patient care. In his guest lecture at the 76th meeting of the DIIR's "Internal Auditing in Hospitals" working group, Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz explained both the opportunities and fields of action as well as the risks of digital transformation that need to be minimized, using the example of the recommended action on digitization and risk management that was drawn up under his leadership by Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit (APS) e.V. and the Austrian Patient Safety Platform. Although the document in question is already several years old, the core risks listed there still describe the essential fields of action for healthcare institutions in order to be able to fully exploit the undisputed potential of digital applications by minimizing their risks.

Of course, the presentation also included a reference to the large language models that are on everyone's lips, better known for their most prominent representative, GPT-4. As with all phenomena that receive excessive coverage, the question arises here as well: Is ChatGPT a game changer or a sow that is being herded through the village? On the basis of some examples a classification of the possibilities but also limitations took place. This included the world premiere of the "Ode to Internal Auditing", of course created with the active support of ChatGPT.

At this point we would like to thank Claudia Clauß, head of the internal audit department of the University Hospital Leipzig and Ronald Kühn, head of the DIIR working group Internal Audit in Hospitals for the invitation and the excellent organization of the event.

For more information on the DIIR Working Group on Internal Auditing in Hospitals, please visit: https://www.diir.de/arbeitskreise/interne-revision-im-krankenhaus/

The SAFE@KCH research project was launched in 2021 to sustainably strengthen patient safety at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH), the largest hospital in Malawi's capital Lilongwe. To this end, six Patient Safety Ambassadors from Malawi were trained in Germany last year to use their training to educate other local health professionals in patient safety measures. In March 2023, Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, head of WiHelP and scientific director of the project, visited KCH for the third time. The visit took place under difficult circumstances, as Malawi is currently suffering from the deadliest cholera epidemic in the country's history and at the same time "Freddy" was raging, the longest cyclone in the history of weather records with more than 100 days. Malawi was hit several times by this cyclone, which claimed many lives, destroyed infrastructure and put an additional strain on Malawi's health system, while at the same time causing nationwide power outages. However, all these circumstances did not prevent the Patient Safety Ambassadors trained in Germany from training their colleagues themselves, accompanied by Prof. Strametz, on the basis of the jointly prepared training materials. Occasional power outages were easily bridged with cell phone flashlights, and at the end of the two-day training, concrete improvement projects for KCH were launched in interdisciplinary working groups for all of the Joint Commission's International Patient Safety Goals. Still very impressed by the energy and will to improve the care situation, Prof. Strametz draws an extremely positive conclusion of the course of the project so far: "Our plan for the multiplier training has been a complete success. Future basic training courses in patient safety can be carried out independently by the Patient Safety Ambassadors on site and coupled with quality improvement projects. The project is scheduled to conclude in August 2023 with a presentation of the quality projects implemented by then. Follow-up projects based on SAFE@KCH are already being planned.

For more information on the project, click here.

Following the guiding principle "Quality of Health Services in a Heterogeneous Society", this year's annual conference of the German Society for Health Economics took place at Leibnitz University in Hannover on March 13th and 14th.

Prof. Dr. Silke Arnegger, deputy director of the institute, and WiHelP members Prof. Dr. Thomas Neusius and Ariane Herberg were also present. Five lecture sessions with different exciting topics offered WiHelP members exciting input, inspiration and interesting meetings. In addition, Prof Dr. Silke Arnegger and Ariane Herberg were able to present their research on the current topic of same-sector care and reimbursement with a focus on orthopedics and trauma surgery, which you can learn more about in the Working Paper.

Furthermore, WiHelP congratulates Prof. Dr. Silke Arnegger on taking office as chairperson for the dggö committee "Care and Remuneration", which she will hold together with Robert Messerle (Hamburg Center for Health Economics). This success was duly celebrated at the evening event in the beautiful New City Hall.

Under the motto "Quality Management - Close to People", this year's annual conference of the Society for Quality Management in Health Care e.V. (GQMG) took place at the Medical School in Hamburg on March 09th and 10th.

In addition to exciting workshops on topics such as shared decision making, clinical ethics and complaint management, our research associate Hannah Rösner was also able to participate in two different workshops and present her research topics.

First, the current results of the KhaSiMiR study (Hospital Study on Safety through Management of Intra-Hospital Risks 2021-22) were presented. This study, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health, was conducted by representatives of HSRM, German Patient Safety Coalition, German Hospital Federation, and the Institute for Patient Safety, and addresses the implementation status and current challenges of clinical risk management (kRM). On the part of WiHelP, in addition to the quantitative survey, Hannah Rösner conducted a qualitative survey with those responsible for kRM in order to identify barriers and facilitating factors in the implementation of kRM.

On the other hand, another workshop in cooperation with the representatives of the Medical School Hamburg Prof. Dr. Hartwig Marung and Prof. Dr. Dr. Rainer Petzina dealt with the topic of the Second Victim Phenomenon. In the workshop, the Second Victim topic was comprehensively presented and the process and possible consequences of the phenomenon were discussed. Helpful support offers for Second Victims were discussed in an interactive conversation with the workshop participants. A special focus was placed on the three SeViD studies published to date.

On February 28th, 2023, the study "Second Victims among German Emergency Medical Services Physicians (SeViD-III-Study)" was published in the Q1 journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The SeViD consortium consisting of scientists at 7 locations in German-speaking countries is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, the director of the Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Econimics and Patient Safety (WiHelP). Co-authors of the study were Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm.

Second victims are, according to the revised, world's first evidence-based definition developed by the European Researchers' Network Working on Second Victims (ERNST) under the vice chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz in late 2022: "Any health care worker, directly or indirectly involved in an unanticipated adverse patient event, unintentional healthcare error, or patient injury and who becomes victimized in the sense that they are also negatively impacted."

The SeViD-III study as part of the SeViD project with 14 individual studies is the first study in Germany to investigate the prevalence of the second victim phenomenon among emergency physicians. The aim of this study is to create transparency regarding this long-tabooed but widespread and highly safety-relevant problem in emergency medicine. Only in this way can effective and needs-based support strategies for second victims be developed and sustainably introduced, based on the identified needs of emergency physicians. Mental health worker protection is an essential component of increasing health system resilience, according to global health and patient safety experts, and is one of the priorities of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Plan of Action for Patient Safety 2021-2030.

WiHelP congratulates its members on the publication of this important study.

Please feel free to direct any questions regarding the content to reinhard.strametz(at)hs-rm.de. To access the study, which is available via open access, click here.

The non-profit association for psychosocial competence and support in health care - PSU-Akut e.V. is the leading association for the prevention concept of psychosocial support (PSU), which offers prevention, training and acute assistance in the context of special stress situations in health care. The focus of the PSU work is on so-called peer supporters.

In January, the starting signal was given for a special project that is unique in Germany: PSU-Akut e.V. was commissioned with the implementation of the project "PSU Bavaria". The aim of the project is to create financial, structural and professional conditions for the permanent establishment of a so-called specialist and coordination office in order to anchor psychosocial support (PSU) throughout the Bavarian health care system.

The project "Establishment of Structures for a Specialist and Coordination Unit - Psychosocial Support in the Bavarian Health Care System" is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Health and Care (StMGP) and financially supported by the Bavarian State Medical Association (BLÄK). PSU-Akut e.V. cooperates with the Association of Nurses in Bavaria (VdPB) and the Bavarian Hospital Association (BKG) in the implementation of the project.

The RheinMain University of Applied Sciences is conducting an external process and results evaluation to accompany the project. For the project kick-off, Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, Institute Director of WiHelP, Prof. Dr. Thomas Neusius and Isabell Wiesenhütter were invited to Munich. The meeting was the perfect opportunity to get to know the project and the people involved and to collect ideas. We would like to thank them for the invitation and look forward to working with them in the coming months.

You can find more information about the "PSU Bavaria" project here.

Eva Potura, chairwoman and co-founder of the Austrian association "secondvictim.at" for the support of mentally stressed health professionals, was invited by WiHelP to be our guest at WBS on January 24th, 2023. In an exciting keynote lecture, she explained to interested students and researchers how it came to the foundation of this important association and how the association supports Second Victims in Austria.

Second Victims are healthcare professionals who experience an adverse event or patient harm at work, or who make an unintentional mistake and are themselves also traumatized by this negative experience. To ensure the performance of health care systems, it is elementary to support staff in such emotional states of emergency. "Since there was no systematic point of contact for those affected outside their own organization in Austria before the association was founded, "secondvictim.at" is doing remarkable pioneering work in this field," said Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, head of WiHelP.

Her keynote lecture was accompanied by a presentation of Hannah Rösner and Victoria Klemm (researchers at WiHelP), who talked about the latest research results of WiHelP on the Second Victim Phenomenon in Germany, which have recently been published in leading international journals.

In addition to the academic afternoon, Dr. Potura's visit also served to plan the first Austria-wide systematic survey on the state of the Second Victim Phenomenon, which is now being extended to our neighboring country as part of the SeViD project. We are looking forward to further cooperation and the first return visit in March 2023.

To see the homepage of secondvictim.at, click here.

The first study on second victims in a German-speaking hospital was published on 20 January 2023.

Since 2019, mental health has been a high priority at Klinik Hietzing, one of Vienna’s main hospitals run by the Wiener Gesundheitsverbund (Vienna Hospital Group). As part of a project to implement systematic, collegial help (KoHi) that had been planned and initiated before the Corona pandemic, a survey was conducted to examine the prevalence, symptom load, and preferred offers of help within the hospital’s own workforce. Based on these important findings, a system for training collegial helpers (KoHis) was established to offer better help to colleagues in exceptional psychological situations in the form of psychological first aid. In this lighthouse project, which has already won several patient safety awards, WiHelP has been cooperating with the Karl Landsteiner Institute for Clinical Risk Management in Vienna as the evaluating institution since the beginning of the project. "While previous studies on the second victim phenomenon in German-speaking countries always had to be run by professional associations, Klinik Hietzing is breaking the taboo of publicly reporting on the psychological stress experienced by healthcare professionals in its own facility. It comes as no surprise that the prevalence of these problems is lower at Klinik Hietzing than the national average of previous second victim surveys (SeViD), as there has been deliberate investment in the support of healthcare staff for many years," says Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, Director of WiHelP. The KoHi project also serves as one of four European lighthouse projects in the European Researchers’ Network Working on Second Victims (ERNST).

You can access the publication of the KoHi-I study here.

On November 29, 2022, Prof. Silke Arnegger, Deputy Director of WiHelP, organized an evening event with Abraham Klink. The Dutch Minister of Health from 2007 to 2010 was invited to the WBS and offered an exciting lecture. Today, Abraham Klink is Senior Executive Advisor at Strategy& Netherlands, PwC, in Amsterdam, where he is committed to strengthening the healthcare system and using digitalization to its advantage.

WBS students and staff were invited to attend the lecture. The presentation, entitled "saving lives and costs: a contribution to the sustainability of health care," addressed the 2006 reform of the Dutch health care system. Parallels could be drawn to the German health care system and how the findings from the Netherlands could also be applied in Germany to strengthen the health care system in the long term. During the lecture, there was a lively discussion, which offered new impulses in many places. Afterwards, these thought-provoking impulses could be discussed in a convivial round with drinks and catering. Thematically, the presentation was all about WiHelP, highlighting ways to sustainably improve a health care system and the barriers to consider when implementing it. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Abraham Klink for this excellent lecture, and to Prof. Silke Arnegger for making this lecture possible with her commitment and good planning.

On 28 October 2022, the European Researchers' Network Working on Second Victims (ERNST) met at the House of Logistics and Mobility HOLM in Frankfurt. The invitation was extended by Professor Reinhard Strametz, who is vice-chairman and German delegate of the ERNST Consortium, in his function as director of the Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Economics and Patient Safety (WiHelP).

The research meeting resulted in the world’s first evidence-based definition of the term second victims created through systematic review. Furthermore, the researchers developed work packages to identify best practice approaches from selected high reliability industries.

The event organized by the Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Economics and Patient Safety (WiHelP) was also an international networking opportunity for the ERNST delegates from Belgium, Italy, Romania, Estonia, Spain and Germany. It was well received by the participants thanks to the excellent organization by Victoria Klemm (WiHelP coordinator) and Pauline Wilbert student in the B.Sc. Health Care Economics program).

HOLM’s convenient location next to Frankfurt Airport allowed all delegates to travel back to their home countries immediately after the meeting. Next September, WiHelP will host the next European Training School of the ERNST consortium at Wiesbaden Business School.

Further information on the homepage of the ERNST Consortium.

Foto of the participants of the research meeting on second victims: L-R, back row: Georgeta Popovici (RO), Kris Vanhaecht (BE), Amaya Gonzalez (ES), Kaja Polluste (EE) L-R, front row: Pauline Wilbert (DE / WiHelP), Victoria Klemm (DE / WiHelP), Raluca Sfetcu (RO), Massimiliano Panella (IT), Reinhard Strametz (DE / WiHelP) | © WiHelP - Wiesbaden Business School - Hochschule RheinMain

Professor Reinhard Strametz and two of his colleagues participated in the ERNST Training School in Zagreb from October 3–5, 2022. Established in 2020, the ERNST Consortium is the European network for research on the second victim phenomenon, which is currently compromising the operability of European healthcare systems.

One of the major tasks of this network is organizing and implementing international training schools. This year’s training school in Zagreb, Croatia, was the first on-site ERNST training school due to Covid-19. Prof. Dr. Strametz, Vice Chairman of the ERNST Consortium and international second victim expert, was an on-site trainer. Hannah Rösner (research assistant) and Victoria Klemm (WiHelp coordinator) participated as trainees.

The Training School conveyed knowledge on second victims to about 20 trainees from 12 different EU countries, focusing on ways to implement support services for those affected. Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Economics and Patient Safety (WiHelP) presented and discussed its research results from existing collaborations. While studies and assistance programs are already underway in some countries, addressing the second victim phenomenon is still uncharted territory in others. Thus, the event was a platform for scientific exchange and European knowledge transfer. New international research collaborations resulted from the event.

We are very pleased that the upcoming annual ERNST Training School will take place at the Wiesbaden Business School giving us the chance to further develop this highly relevant topic for European healthcare systems.

A delegation from the East African state visited Wiesbaden as part of the third-party funded SAFE@KCH project, Malawi's first patient safety project, funded by the GIZ (Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit). Two female doctors, two male nurses and the two heads of quality management of the Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) in the Malawian capital Lilongwe visited the Wiesbaden Business School of the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences (HSRM) and reported on the status of the cooperation project.

Mercy Katantha, head of KCH’s quality management department, reported on the progress of patient safety, which has already been improved by streamlining checklists, forms and introducing wristbands with patient data. However, she also pointed out that in addition to the initial success stories, there are still numerous challenges in the areas of preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative care management. Emmie Jingini, also from KCH’s QM department, presented the measures taken to ensure hand hygiene. Just like in Germany, however, there is still room for improvement in the consistent implementation of existing standards.

Nevertheless, Professor Reinhard Strametz, who initiated the joint project, spoke of a lighthouse project for Malawi and added that patient safety is always an organizational and logistical challenge – regardless of the country. "It is important to be supported by management; it always comes down to resources," said the HSRM physician and economist, who is also Director of the Wiesbaden Institute for Healthcare Economics and Patient Safety (WiHelP). Addressing health care economics students, he said: "You will one day be co-responsible for making patient safety happen!"

During their stay, the delegation visited the Helios Dr.-Horst-Schmidt Clinics and St. Josefs Hospital in Wiesbaden. The agenda included visits to the operating and emergency rooms of the JoHo and professional exchange. The delegation’s packed program also contained a technical discussion with the head of the Patient Safety and Quality Unit at Frankfurt University Hospital, a training as Patient Safety Ambassadors, and an academic afternoon followed by a faculty dinner. The participants also took part in an excursion to Berlin to the association Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit e.V. (Patient Safety Action Alliance)

Lead by the APS (Aktionsbündnis PatientenSicherheit e.V.), the German Hospital Institute has started the online survey of hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. Based on the surveys in 2010 and 2015, the questionnaire was extensively revised and updated, for example, by including current topics such as the use of critical incident reporting systems, the support for staff involved in critical incidents and discharge management.

The questions are about practical on-site implementation with the aim of developing suggestions for policy makers, hospitals and rehabilitation facilities on how to further develop risk management to increase patient safety.

To follow international safety standards, the categories of the WHO Patient Safety Action Plan are included.

We hope for a high participation from the hospitals and rehabilitation facilities we contacted in order to obtain a solid data basis for the improvement of safety management.

The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Health and conducted together with the following partners:

• Dr. Martina Schmiedhofer, Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit e.V.
• Dr. Karl Blum, German Hospital Institute (DKI) Düsseldorf
• Dr. Bernd Metzinger MPH, German Hospital Federation (DKG) Berlin
• Prof. Dr. Reinhard Strametz, , Chair for Patient Safety, Wiesbaden Business School / RheinMain University of Applied Sciences
• Prof. Dr. Matthias Weigl, Institute for Patient Safety (IfPS) at the University of Bonn

Hospital study KhaSiMiR 21: Project team at the House of Logistics and Mobility meeting | © APS_ev