The evaluation of the perceptions of patient safety cultures of health care workers: university hospital example

Abstract

Introduction: The most important indicator of health care quality is patient safety. Efforts to improve the quality and to ensure continuity of healthcare institutions and to reduce the errors caused by the system and the service providers are preliminary .Objectives: A culture of patient safety should be developed in employees to prevent errors, to prevent them from being repeated, report, and analyze them that may arise in healthcare services. For this reason, it is aimed to determine the level of patient safety culture of healthcare workers working in university hospital. Materials and Methods: The study population was carved out of health care workers in a university hospital operating in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In the questionnaire survey, 200 questionnaires were distributed between February 20 and March 20, 152 questionnaires were filled in completely and were taken into consideration. The level of error in the study was I± = 0.05. Findings: It was stated that 89.5% of the health personnel participating in the research had direct interaction with the patient, 84.9% did not write any incident report and 64.9% stated that the units that they worked in were very good and acceptable for patient safety. The culture perception of patient safety of health workers was found to be lowest in average general patient safety (2.76 ± 0.57), and the highest average was found in communication (3,41 ± 0,65). The perceptions of single employees reporting events (3,06 ± 1,11) were higher than married employees (2,67 ± 1,20), and the difference was statistically significant (p <0.05). The professions of the employees made a meaningful difference in the reporting of scale sub-dimensions and patient safety (p <0.05). The Physicians' perception of reporting (2.88 ± 0.96) and hospital safety (2.92 ± 0.59) were higher than nurses and assistant healthcare personnel. Conclusion: The perception level of the health workers is moderate and the perception level of the physicians is higher than the other health workers. Employees have a lower perception of reporting events. Defining employees' units as acceptable for patient safety indicates that training for employees and patient safety culture needs to be increased.