Abstract
Background: Patient safety is one of the biggest challenges in health care through providing safe, effective care, and one of the most significant areas of opportunity for improvement is medication safety, which is a top priority for patient harm prevention from medication errors. Aim: To assess nurses’ perceptions concerning patient safety culture and the applicability of medication safety rules. Design: A descriptive correlational design was utilized. Settings: Six hospitals affiliated to the Ministry of Health from three governorates in Egypt. Participants: A sample of 421 nurses was chosen from the selected hospitals to participate in a structured questionnaire dealing with twelve dimensions to determine the level of nurses’ awareness and their perceptions of patient safety culture, and the application of medication safety rules was measured by 99 questions under thirteen dimensions to collect the study data. The results revealed that only 26.13% of studied nurses indicated a high perception of overall patient safety culture, although 77.90% reported no adverse events during the last six months. Furthermore, 76.72% reported that they applied overall medication rules to prevent errors. Based on the study findings, it is recommended to develop strategies to disseminate patient safety culture and reduce punitive culture in health organizations, creating a climate of open communication and continuous learning. The development and optimizing of data collection and reporting systems and evidence-based programs for improving culture of patient safety in hospitals is necessary, and nurses must be encouraged to learn more about incident reports and how to write medication administration error reports.
Highlights
Safety is a serious component of health care quality, and health care organizations continually attempt to improve the safety of their services, with increasing recognition of the importance of establishing a safety culture
The World Health Organization (WHO, 2014) identified patient safety practices as processes or structures that reduce the probability of adverse events resulting from exposure to the health care system across a range of diseases and procedures, while patient safety culture is the integration of safety thinking and practices in clinical activities (Bahrami et al, 2013)
Non-punitive response to errors and absence of communication openness were the main obstacles to patient safety as perceived by nurses (96.44%, 83.85% and 68.17, respectively)
Summary
Safety is a serious component of health care quality, and health care organizations continually attempt to improve the safety of their services, with increasing recognition of the importance of establishing a safety culture. In addition to human suffering, unsafe health care exacts a heavy economic burden, with an estimated 510% of total health expenditure being diverted to patching up unsafe practices that resulted in patient harm. Such errors are attributable to system failures rather than individual negligence on the part of healthcare professionals, they are often blamed as the last link in a faulty chain. The development and optimizing of data collection and reporting systems and evidence-based programs for improving culture of patient safety in hospitals is necessary, and nurses must be encouraged to learn more about incident reports and how to write medication administration error reports
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