Peer support

Patient safety incidents have strong personal and professional impact on the health care professionals involved. Following such an incident, many of them experience long-term negative emotions and impaired professional functioning. For this reason, in 2016 Shapiro argued for the provision of peer support directly after an incident. Five Dutch University Medical Centres formed a partnership that same year to set up a Peer Support program. A descriptive evaluation of their experience shows that Peer Support is widely provided, fulfils an apparent need, is highly valued by colleagues who received it, and noticeably contributes to an open culture. The Peer Support program helps the upset professionals to continue to function in their role and to contribute to quality improvement after the incident. The benefits of Peer Support are clearly noticeable, but difficult to quantify. Therefore, we suggest that Peer Support should be assessed by the new, more qualitative evaluation of health care benefits, so hospital boards will support continuation of the program.

Conflict of interest and financial support: potential conflicts of interest have been reported for this article. ICMJE forms provided by the authors are available online along with the full text of this article.