Perceived Patient Safety Culture among Healthcare Providers in Southern Jordanian Hospitals during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Background: The first step towards creating safe circumstances for patient care is to conduct thorough and ongoing assessments of the safety culture in the healthcare sector. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess healthcare professionals’ perceived culture of patient safety during the 2019 corona virus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in southern Jordanian hospitals. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional research of healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses and their administrators) was carried out. An Arabic translation of the Hospital Survey of Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC) questionnaire was used to collect information from 531 healthcare providers between July and November 2021 in four hospitals in Southern Jordan. Results: Nurses perceived ‘staffing’ as the highest dimension of the twelve dimensions of safety culture. However, they perceived ‘reporting patient safety events’ as the lowest dimension. The results show that healthcare providers perceived the twelve dimensions of patient safety culture as weakness areas that need improvement. The number of patient safety events reported by respondents in public hospitals was significantly (p<0.05) higher than the number of those reported by respondents in private ones (2.4±0.71 vs. 2.8±0.98, respectively). Conclusions: Hospitals in southern Jordan need to improve their patient safety culture procedures as well as patient safety aspects, such as personnel, handoffs and reporting-related components. Implications for Nursing: Hospital policies need to be adopted in a way that enhances a blame-free culture and an organized safety education program for all healthcare providers, especially new staff. Healthcare providers should be motivated to work as a team through a more reasonable allocation of authority and commission of work. Keywords: Patient safety, Safety culture, Southern Jordan, COVID-19 pandemic