Organizational Systems and Quality Leadership
Task 2
Jill Riccobono
Western Governors University

Organizational Systems and Quality Leadership Task 2
A. Root Cause Analysis
A root cause analysis (RCA) looks at an event and considers what happened, why it happened what will be done to prevent it from happening again and how will we know that the changes made will improve the safety of the system. It takes into consideration causative factors, errors and hazards that led to a sentinel event. In this case it was a patient’s death. RCA should not look to place blame on people, but rather processes that need to be improved.
The first step in a RCA is to identify what happened. In the scenario, presented in this task, the patient was over sedated and subsequently died. Step two is to identify why this happened. There were preventable causative factors, or errors, that led to this sentinel event. The hospital’s conscious sedation policy requires that the patient remains on continuous BP, ECG, and pulse oximeter throughout the procedure and there was no mention that this was performed at all throughout the procedure. It was not until after the procedure that Mr. B was placed on continuous BP and pulse oximeter, and at that time, the patient was left in the room, with only a family member while Nurse J attended to another patient. When the alarm is heard that the patient has low O2 sats, the LPN, enters the room and resets the alarm and repeats the B/P reading. His oxygen level was not rechecked, nor was he placed on supplemental oxygen, nor was the RN informed at this time, and the patient was once again left unmonitored. The conscious sedation policy also states that all practitioners who perform moderate sedation must first successfully complete the hospital’s moderate sedation training module, which includes drug selection and acceptable dose ranges. There is