Risk Assessment of Processes of Rasoule Akram Emergency Department by the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Methodology

According to classification of the Emergency Department (ED) as a high-risk area in a hospital, failures of six problematic emergency processes in Rasoule Akram Emergency Department were identified, assessed, prioritized, and analyzed in order to improve patient's safety. The Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), as one of the risk management techniques, was used for the analysis.

This was a descriptive research that quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed some failure modes and effects. FMEA is a team-based, systematic, proactive technique that is used to prevent process and product problems before they occur. For identification of root causes of the analyzed failures, Eindhoven Classification Model (ECM) was used.

By FMEA, 51 failure modes in the 6 selected emergency processes were identified and assessed. With the 75% reliability, 16 failure modes (with RPN ³ 250) were identified and entitled as "failures with non-acceptable risk", and then root causes of them were classified by ECM.

According to these result, Proactive FMEA was an efficient and effective method for identifying and prioritizing the improvable points of a running process in a crowded and complex hospital ward, such as an ED.