Root Cause Analysis in Primary Care course for GPs

This session focuses on applying root cause analysis (RCA) in general practice. RCA is a systematic incident investigation method that can be used to identify the underlying systems factors that led to a patient safety incident. This session was reviewed by Suchita Shah and last updated in February 2015.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Explain the meaning of key terms that are used in root cause analysis (RCA)
• Describe the benefits of using RCA methods to investigate patient safety incidents that occur in general practice
• Identify best practice in carrying out RCA investigations

RCA is important because the methodologies it provides enable those staff carrying out the incident investigation to think beyond human error. That is to say, to focus not only on what went wrong and how it happened, but also to identify why an incident occurred. So, in terms of Reason’s Swiss Cheese model, RCA promotes the identification of latent conditions, as well as active errors.