Perceptions of Safety Culture and Patient Safety Events

Abstract

In order to preserve a culture of safety, inpatient care teams in hospitals need to be able to communicate effectively with one another. The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the perceptions of patient safety culture and the number of safety incidents that occur in hospitals. With Schein's organizational culture model serving as a guide, researchers were able to find the connections they had hypothesized should exist between certain aspects of safety culture and actual accidents. Both the Materials and the Procedures are: The research team was successful in gaining access to the opinions of a substantial number of clinical teams regarding their safety culture. It was discovered that handoffs and transitions were a significant predictor of the reduction of safety occurrences, in contrast to other predictors, which were not found to be significant. The implications for the research on communication within clinical teams are emphasized here. In conclusion, a discussion of the data findings and a presentation of the implications that these findings have for the variables are given. The implications for healthcare teams in terms of the actions that individual team members will take in the future are also emphasized here. The directions that future research should take are suggested.