MEDICAL PERSONNEL PERCEPTION ON SAFETY ATTITUDE IN A TERTIARY TEACHING HOSPITAL IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Evaluation of the perception of safety attitudes among physicians and nurses in hospitals is important to ensure optimum patient care. The objectives are to assess the perception of medical personnel on safety attitudes at their workplace and to measure the correlation between domains and factors studied. A cross-sectional study involving 160 physicians and 304 nurses is conducted at a teaching hospital. A validated Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) consisting of 6 domains is used to measure the perception of medical personnel on safety attitude at their workplace. The Mann-Whitney test was performed for the comparison of the mean scores between two categorical variables and Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the relationship between two numerical variables in terms of strength and direction. Job satisfaction (73.4 ± 17.6) and management perception (56.1 ± 12.9) domains recorded the highest and lowest mean scores respectively. Doctors showed the highest perceived positive attitudes towards stress identification (57.5%) whereas perception of management (9.4%) has the lowest score, and the nurses showed the highest perceived positive attitudes towards job satisfaction (74.3%), and a low score of perception of management (10.9%). Overall, climate safety and stress recognition domains showed significant correlations with age, level of education, years in specialty, and history of attending safety training. The study results indicated that the medical personnel had low positive safety attitudes towards the management perceptions domain. However, they reported a high level of job satisfaction domain. It is imperative for the management team to take the necessary steps to ensure the personnel develops a positive safety attitude.