September Clinical Spotlight: Safety Culture at OM

This month, our Clinical Education focus is Safety Culture at OM.

When we talk about safety culture, we aren’t just talking about policies, checklists, or what to do after something goes wrong. It’s about the everyday decisions we make to keep our patients, our teammates, and ourselves safe.

At OM, that can look very different depending on where you’re working. It might be a ground crew identifying a problem before leaving a facility, a flight team making sure they have the right equipment and resources before takeoff, an inter-island crew planning for every transition between hospital, ambulance, airport, and aircraft, or our mine medical team recognizing when an industrial hazard needs to be controlled before they can safely reach a patient.

Despite those very different environments, the philosophy is the same:

Recognize → Communicate → Control → Report → Learn

A strong safety culture means everyone has a voice. You don’t need to be the most senior person in the room to identify a concern. If something doesn’t look right, say something. If a process isn’t safe, stop and reassess. If you make a mistake or catch a near miss, report it so we can learn from it.

It also means recognizing that people are human. Fatigue, distraction, task saturation, communication breakdowns, and even the familiar phrase “we’ve always done it this way” can introduce risk. Safety isn’t about expecting perfection—it’s about building teams and systems that recognize those risks before they become harm.

One of the biggest lessons from this month’s education is simple:

A near miss isn’t “nothing happened.” It’s an opportunity to prevent something from happening next time.

Whether you’re working on the ground, in the air, between the islands, at the mine, or supporting those operations behind the scenes, each of us contributes to the culture we work in.

See something. Say something. Learn from it. Make the next operation safer.

C.J. Esparza, MSN,  EMS-RN, CFRN, CNP

Chief Clinical Officer - OptimuMedicine