Patient safety culture from nurses’ perspectives at Qazvin University of Medical Sciences

Abstract

Introduction: The most important priority for healthcare providers is to provide high quality and safe services to patients and nurses’ role in ICUs is very important due to the complexity of their profession and the importance of care for critical patients. Therefore, identifying the weaknesses and strengths of the patient safety culture is a step towards the advancement of safety culture. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the safety culture of nurses in the intensive care units of Qazvin University of Medical Sciences. Patients and Methods: This study is a descriptive-correlation one which was conducted on 214 nurses working in the intensive care units who had the inclusion criteria. To collect data "Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture; HSOPSC" was used. This questionnaire has 42 questions that examine the safety culture in 12 composites. The questionnaires were distributed among all the nurses working in the target departments of different hospitals and detailed information about the questionnaire was given. After data collection, the data were analyzed using SPSS v23. Results: The mean percentage of positive responses to the safety culture questionnaire in intensive care unit was 75.39%. The strengths of the patient safety culture were related to teamwork expectations within units (67.3%), management support for patient safety (62.6%), and teamwork across units (62.6%) and the lowest score for the patient safety culture was related to the non-punitive response to errors (3.3%) and staffing issues (4.2%) and also communication openness (23.8%). Conclusion: The status of the safety culture in intensive care units of Qazvin is acceptable. However, the attention of nursing managers in some areas in planning and policymaking to promote the patient safety culture seems necessary.

Keywords

• patient safety culture
• intensive care unit
• nurse
• critical care