IOWA
Catholic Globe
Root cause analysis: This is a fairly new term making its way around the world of Safe Environment leadership and the U.S. Bishops Secretariat for Child and Youth Protection.
Root cause analysis is used to create a highly reliable culture, by reporting all violations, all “near misses,” and all incidences where established rules and protocols were not followed. By examining what went wrong, or almost went wrong, we can determine weaknesses in our system and correct them. Highly reliable cultures must operate under trying or complex conditions and maintain few or no accidents or breaches in their systems (think airlines, nuclear power plants, and hospitals).
Everyone within these systems understands and follows all the rules all the time, and everyone reports every event that goes against established protocol, because failure to do so could endanger everyone. Leadership in a highly reliable culture is focused on eliminating failure, and encourages everyone to focus on that as well. There is no room for error when a jet is attempting to land, or when a patient in undergoing major surgery, just as there is no room for error when a child’s well-being is at stake.
Since 2002, the number of credible allegations of child sexual abuse reported to dioceses has continued to decline, and that is good news. However, everyone will agree that even one credible report of a child being abused in our church is one too many. Our goal is to eliminate child sexual abuse completely – from every parish and every school, period.
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