Patient Safety Culture: Nurses’ Attitude in Marvdasht Shahid Motahary Hospital, 1392

Introduction

Adverse events and medical errors are among the challenges that health systems in all countries are grappling with, trying to minimize them and reduce the damage caused by them. In overall, one-fifth of the general population are subjected to medical errors, thus, millions of people may die or suffer from preventable medical injuries each year.

The extent of damage caused by these errors and events are so immense that many countries are seriously looking for solutions to prevent or reduce such errors and promote safety (1).

Patient safety issues were taken into consideration by the researchers and experts in the field of health, after the United States Institute of Medical Reports was established in 1999, which addressed the prevalence of medical errors in this country (2).

Patient safety is a major concern in hospitals and is considered as one of the main components of health services quality, meant to avoid the patient from getting in to any kind of injury during care. In fact, unsafe services in addition to having unpleasant consequences for the patient and his family, cause stress on both health workers and the society and finally impose a huge economic burden on the health care system (2).

Different definitions of patient safety culture have been presented. In general, patient safety culture reflects the patient safety priorities among hospital staff (3). Safety culture is the result of individual and group values, attitudes and perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior which define the commitment, methods and skills of an organization in improving safety management (4).

The patient safety culture can be defined as accepting patient safety as the first priority and a common value in an organization and also as an integrated pattern of individual and organizational behavior based on shared values and beliefs which continuously seek to minimize injury to the patient during the care process (1).

In summary, safety culture is one of the dimensions of organizational culture that has a positive safety culture, and all staffs in different levels appreciate the patient safety and consider it as a priority. On the other hand, the first step to improve patient safety culture is evaluation of its existing levels in the hospital (5).

Improving the safety culture has been implemented as a key strategy to improve patient safety in health care systems and evaluation of the safety culture is recommended as a patient safety strategy (1). Several surveys have shown that assessment of patient safety attitude and examining to what extent these attitudes exist could be used as an effective tool for promoting patient safety and such data meet the managers’ information needs over time (6).

Thus, considering the importance of patient safety as a basic principle in improving the quality of clinical services and patient satisfaction (7), this study was aimed at investigating the nurses’ attitudes (who are a large group of health care providers in hospitals) towards the safety culture.

Materials and Methods

In this cross-sectional study, the study population consisted of all nurses who worked in Marvdasht Shahid Motahary hospital in 2013. The studied sample was selected using the simple randomization sampling method as 114. Data were collected through a questionnaire assessing patient safety culture in hospitals [hospital survey on patient safety culture (HSOPSC)] (that was introduced by the agency for health care research and quality in 2004). This questionnaire is the most commonly used tool for assessing patient safety culture and is used in several countries including America, Britain, Netherlands, Turkey, etc (5). In this questionnaire, patient safety culture is viewed from 12 different dimensions and 2 aspects of patient safety rating and the number of errors reported by hospital staff.

Also, it should be noted that the mentioned questionnaire was previously studied in a study entitled “Validation of the Persian translation of hospital patient safety culture questionnaire using the confirmatory factor analysis technique”. It revealed the translated questionnaire with 12 dimensions as the right tool for the assessment of patient safety culture in our hospitals (5).

The questionnaire scale is of Likert-type, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree and from never to always. The questionnaires were distributed among different wards of the hospital where head nurses asked nurses to fill them in, so that nurses from different work shifts entered in, the study. After data collection, SPSS16 software and descriptive statistics (average, percent and etc) were used for data analyzes.

Results

After collecting the questionnaires and data analysis, the following results were obtained. 91% of the participants were female, 3% were male and 6% of participants had not responded to this question. 39% of the participants were single, 56% were married, and 5 % gave no response.

 In addition, the educational degree of 89% of Participants was, bachelor of nursing, 2% were master and above, and 9% had not responded.