A. Explain the general purpose of conducting a root cause analysis (RCA).
Despite the massive advances in the healthcare industry, healthcare organizations continue to register cases of errors or failures in the process of providing quality health care.
It is critical for HCOs to understand the root cause of these problems to avoid reoccurrence, improve the quality of care and performance of the hospital.
The root cause analysis RCA is a critical tool that enables HCOs to conduct a systematic investigation and analysis of the causal or basic causes or triggers of a sentinel event, a near miss sentinel and clusters of low risk errors and failures affecting the HCO’s healthcare systems.
The RCA goes further to understand the root cause of the error or failure in the healthcare system to recommend measures and actions to be taken to avoid a reoccurrence of a similar sentinel event enabling the HCO to improve its healthcare systems to provide safer and high quality care in the future (JCR, 2015).
It is important to note that RCA is not suitable for cases of adverse events triggered by neglect and wilful harm conducted by care providers.
