Survey of Patient Safety Culture Among Hospital Staff in Selected Hospitals at Mangaluru

Background:

Patient safety has become an essential part of the health care and issue of concern worldwide and a lot of work has been done in many countries on issues relating to it. Implementing a safety culture assessment involves the commitment of staff time and resources. Safety culture assessments are new tools in the patient safety improvement arsenal. These tools can be used to measure organizational conditions that lead to adverse events and patient harm, and for developing and evaluating safety improvement interventions in healthcare organizations. They provide a metric by which the implicit shared understandings about ''the way we do things around here'' can be made visible and available as input for change as well.

Aims:

The aim of this study was to assess the current patient safety culture among health-care providers at hospitals using a Hospital Survey for Patient Safety Culture, in which experts delineated a number of safety culture dimensions that a hospital can measure using a culture assessment tool developed for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Objectives of the Study:

1. To measure the patient safety culture among medical staff using Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture Questionnaire (HSOPSC)

2. To measure the patient safety culture among nursing staff using Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture Questionnaire (HSOPSC)

3. To measure the patient safety culture among paramedical staff using Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture Questionnaire (HSOPSC)

4. To compare the differences on patient safety culture among various hospital staff

Method:

A descriptive study consisting of 90 hospital staff including doctors, nurses and paramedical staff selected by using purposive sampling technique was conducted in a multispecialty teaching hospital. Hospital Survey on Patient Safety's PSC dimensions was used to assess the patient safety culture.

Results:

The study showed that majority (55.6%) of hospital staff was in the age group of 20-29 years. Most of them (71.2%) were males. The most represented work area were medical unit (16.6%) followed by laboratory (15.5%), surgical unit (14.4%), mixed medical surgical unit (13.3%),Intensive Care Units(10%), dialysis(8.88%), radiology (8.88%),emergency department (8%),operation theatre(3.33%) and anesthesiology (1.11%).Majority of subjects (30%) reported that they had 1 to 5 years of work experience in the relevant unit. Highest positive response on measurement of patient safety culture by medical staff was in the dimension of Staffing (85.2%), which indicated that there was no shortage of medical staff in the hospital and least reported was handoffs and transition (54%), which showed high chances of ineffective handoffs that can contribute to failures in patient safety including medication errors, wrong-site surgery and patient deaths. Highest positive response on measurement of patient safety culture by nursing staff was in the dimension of Team work within the units (87.15%), which signified the importance of team work contributing to patient safety and least reported response was Staffing (60.3%), which indicated that there is a severe shortage of nursing staff in the hospital. Highest positive response of on measurement of patient safety culture by paramedical staff was in the dimension of Organizational learning - Continuous improvement (86.6%), which might be due to learning from the adverse events that takes place in the hospital by analyzing and taking measures to prevent repetition of same adverse events and least reported response was Handoffs and transition (57.3%), which showed high chances of ineffective handoffs that can contribute to failures in patient safety.

Interpretation and Conclusion:

Findings of the study showed that there was a significant difference between perceptions of safety culture among doctors, nurses and paramedical in three dimensions like Supervisor/manager expectation and actions promoting patient safety, Feedback and communication about error and Communication openness.