RITE Cohort: RITE 24 Thursdays Summer 2022
Team Members: Paul Palomares, Karen Siegle, Alyssa Limmer, Dakota White, Taleah Tatum
Team Sponsor(s): Sri Seshadri, Quynh Le
The Problem: There has been a downward trend of safety events reported by Radiation Therapists through Radiation Oncology’s internal incident reporting system, Safety Through Alertness and Reaction (STAR).
Our analysis pointed to several key focus areas from our fishbone:

These helped us develop our key drivers:

Project Results:
We were able to increase the number of STAR reports and achieve our SMART goal by the end of the cohort.
Reflection:
We started off the RITE course with a different SMART goal, but after a few weeks we realized our it was too large of scope and not easily measured. We worked well as a team to pivot to a new SMART goal that was ultimately easier to measure and worked well for the course. When we first made this change we felt behind on data collection and interventions, having to start over in the middle of the course. However, our team worked so well together and we were able to execute on data collection and interventions quickly. We wish we had more time as we felt that everything went by so quickly! We enjoyed our courses and pre-work videos and articles, we learned so much. One key takeaway we learned as part of this project was about safety reporting. We came to understand that increasing safety reporting does not necessarily mean a better or improved safety culture, as we initially thought. We now understand this larger goal of improving safety culture needs to be addressed with other measures which we will continue to work on as a larger project after the RITE course. Reflecting on the course, we wish we had started data collection sooner since everything went so quickly and we wish we had initially had a better understanding of measurable outcomes so we would not have had to change goals in the middle. Overall, we really enjoyed this work and the RITE course!