Nearly one-third of clinicians say they now speak up when witnessing potentially harmful behavior by colleagues — up from 10% in 2005 — highlighting both progress and persistent safety culture gaps, according to 2025 survey data published March 26 in the American Journal of Critical Care.
The 2025 survey, led by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses as a follow-up to the landmark 2005 Silence Kills study, asked more than 3,500 healthcare professionals how they responded to potentially harmful behavior as well as how those experiences affected patient care and clinical innovation.
Here are four things to know from the survey data:
• In the survey, 40% of respondents said they reported witnessing broken rules and 22% reported witnessing mistakes weekly.Of those respondents, 47% confronted the offender to express their concerns over broken rules and 53% over mistakes.
• Respondents said they were less likely to confront colleagues for incompetence, lack of support, disrespect, poor teamwork, bias and micromanagement.
• Organizations that encouraged speaking up, reminding, accountability and challenging assumptions had 20 times more healthcare workers who embraced new tools and technology and were 2.5 times more proactive regarding patient outcomes and care quality.
• “Speaking up continues to be the vehicle for shaping the norms that govern behavior and results in healthcare,” Vicki Good, DNP, RN, the AACN’s chief clinical officer, said in an April 21 news release. “Conversely, a failure to speak up indicates an absence of healthy norms that will inevitably impact patient safety and staff outcomes.”
Read the full survey results here.
The post Healthcare’s culture of silence is breaking: 4 notes appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
