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Patient safety culture is a vital element to create patient safety in healthcare organisations. Emergency department (ED) professionals operate in unstable conditions that may pose risk to patient safety on day-to-day basis. The aim of this study was to assess the status of patient safety culture and to quantify the dimensions of safety culture in the ED setting.

This was a descriptive cross sectional study that used a validated questionnaire distributed to the staff working in the nominated EDs . Perceptions on various dimensions of safety culture were reported and the frequency of positive responses for each dimension was calculated.

“Teamwork” is the only dimension that rated positive by over 70% of participants. Other dimensions rated below 50%, except for “Organisational learning–continuous improvement” which rated 51.2%. Areas that rated the lowest were “Handover and transitions”, “Staffing”, “Non-punitive response to error” and “Frequency of event reporting” with average positive response rate of 15.4%, 26%, 26.8% and 27.6%, respectively.

This study displayed a concerning perceptions held by participants about the deficiency of patient safety culture in their EDs. Moreover, it provided a baseline finding giving a clearer vision of the areas of patient safety culture that need improvement.

Safety activities have been initiated in healthcare organizations in Taiwan, but little is known about the performance and trends of safety culture on a timely basis. This study aims to comprehensively review the articles that have conducted two worldwide patient safety culture instruments (HSPSC and SAQ) in Taiwan to provide the extent of existing knowledge about healthcare professionals' perception related to patient safety.

The Web of Science, Medline (Pubmed) and Embas were used as the database to search papers related to the patient safety culture in Taiwan from 2008 to June 30, 2019.

Twenty-four relative articles in total were found and further investigations confirmed that the regular assessment of patient safety culture among hospital staff is essentially important for healthcare organizations to reduce the rates of medical errors and malpractice. Moreover, the elements influencing patient safety culture may vary due to the difference in job positions, age, experience in organization and cultural settings.

The summary of findings enables healthcare administrators and practitioners to understand key components of patient safety culture for continuous improvement in medical quality.

Assessing the safety culture in healthcare organizations is a foundation to achieve excellent medical quality and service. The implications of this study could be useful for hospitals to establish a safer environment for patients.

The purpose is to assess the patient safety culture perceived by healthcare and administrative staff in a Brazilian hospital and examine whether education and experience are related to positive perceptions.

A descriptive–analytical case study was carried out at Ernesto Dornelles Hospital, a private Brazilian institution. The Brazilian version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture was used to assess the perceptions of 618 participants, of whom 315 worked in healthcare assistance and 303 in administrative services. The main outcome was the percentage of positive responses, and the independent variables included the type of work, schooling and length of experience.

None of the twelve dimensions was strengthened. The percentage of positive responses was the highest for “Hospital management support for patient safety” (67.5%), and the lowest was for “Nonpunitive response to error” (29%). The healthcare staff had a slightly higher average than the administrative staff. The percentage of positive responses from professionals with undergraduate or graduate degrees was higher for the eight dimensions of safety culture. The length of hospital experience was not associated with any dimensions.

This study explored the influence of education and professional experience on the perception of patient safety in healthcare and administrative staff from a private institution. These approaches allow to know with greater depth and clarity factors that are related to the patient safety culture and, thus, have more consistent evidence to support interventions in specific needs.

Building a new hospital requires a major investment in capital infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of bricks-and-mortar on patient safety culture before and two years after the move of a large tertiary hospital to a greenfield site. The difference in patient safety perceptions between clinical and non-clinical staff is also explored.

This research uses data collected from the same workforce across two time periods (2013 and 2015) in a large Australian healthcare service. Validated surveys of patient safety culture (n=306 and 246) were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Using two-way analysis of variance, the authors found that perceived patient safety culture remains unchanged for staff despite a major relocation and upgrade of services and different perceptions of patient safety culture between staff groups remains the same throughout change.

A dramatic change in physical context, such as moving an entire hospital, made no measurable impact on perceived patient safety culture by major groups of staff. Improving patient safety culture requires more than investment in buildings and infrastructure. Understanding differences in professional perspectives of patient safety culture may inform organisational management approaches, and enhance the targeting of specific strategies.

The authors believe this to be the first empirically based paper that investigates the impact of a large investment into hospital capital and a subsequent relocation of services on clinical and non-clinical staff perceptions of patient safety culture.

Patient safety improvement through management has been a prime issue since 2000, when the Institute of Medicine reported that preventable mismanagement was responsible for the majority of medical errors. Learning culture, interdisciplinary action teams, and punitive culture have been discussed as viable ways to address these errors. While these individual factors have been found to be significant, we have yet to understand the interactions of these elements. The role of leadership, which has been overlooked, is critical to facilitate or constrain these elements. The interactions of these three elements and the role of leadership were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Our finding revealed the three elements were closely knitted, and leadership roles had considerable impact in nurturing learning culture and constraining punitive culture, which in turn enhanced patient safety

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between organizational learning and patient safety culture in hospital pharmacy settings as determined by the learning organization survey short-form (LOS-27) and pharmacy survey on patient safety culture instruments, and to further explore how dimensions of organizational learning relate to dimensions of pharmacy patient safety culture.

This study is a cross-sectional study. Data were obtained from three public hospital pharmacies and three private hospital pharmacies in Kuwait. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

A total of 272 surveys (59.1 percent response rate) were completed and returned. The results indicated a significant positive relationship between organizational learning and patient safety culture in hospital pharmacy settings (path coefficient of 0.826, p-value <0.05 and R² of 0.683). Several dimensions of the organizational learning showed significant links to the various dimensions of the pharmacy patient safety culture. Specifically, training (TRN), management that reinforces learning (MRL) and supportive learning environment (SLE) had the strongest effects on the pharmacy patient safety culture dimensions. Moreover, these effects indicated that MRL, SLE and TRN were associated with improvements in most dimensions of pharmacy patient safety culture.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to assess the relationship between organizational learning, patient safety culture and their dimensions in hospital pharmacy settings.

This article aims to encourage healthcare administrators to consider the learning organization concept and foster collaborative learning among teams in their attempt to improve patient safety.

Relevant healthcare, organizational behavior and human resource management literature was reviewed.

A patient safety culture, fostered by healthcare leaders, should include an organizational culture that encourages collaborative learning, replaces the blame culture, prioritizes patient safety and rewards individuals who identify serious mistakes.

As healthcare institution staffs are being asked to deliver more complex medical services with fewer resources, there is a need to understand how hospital staff can learn from other organizational settings, especially the non‐healthcare sectors.

The paper provides suggestions for improving patient safety which are drawn from the health and business management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between hospitals’ electronic health record (EHR) adoption characteristics and their patient safety cultures. The “Meaningful Use” (MU) program is designed to increase hospitals’ adoption of EHR, which will lead to better care quality, reduce medical errors, avoid unnecessary cost, and promote a patient safety culture. To reduce medical errors, hospital leaders have been encouraged to promote safety cultures common to high-reliability organizations. Expecting a positive relationship between EHR adoption and improved patient safety cultures appears sound in theory, but it has yet to be empirically demonstrated.

Providers’ perceptions of patient safety culture and counts of patient safety incidents are explored in relationship to hospital EHR adoption patterns. Multi-level modeling is employed to data drawn from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s surveys on patient safety culture (level 1) and the American Hospital Association’s survey and healthcare information technology supplement (level 2).

The findings suggest that the early adoption of EHR capabilities hold a negative association to the number of patient safety events reported. However, this relationship was not present in providers’ perceptions of overall patient safety cultures. These mixed results suggest that the understanding of the EHR-patient safety culture relationship needs further research.

Relating EHR MU and providers’ care quality attitudes is an important leading indicator for improved patient safety cultures. For healthcare facility managers and providers, the ability to effectively quantify the impact of new technologies on efforts to change organizational cultures is important for pinpointing clinical areas for process improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between patient safety culture and hospital performance using objective performance measures and secondary data on patient safety culture.

Patient safety culture is measured using data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. Hospital performance is measured using objective patient safety and operational performance metrics collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Control variables were obtained from the CMS Provider of Service database. The merged data included 154 US hospitals, with an average of 848 respondents per hospital providing culture data. Hierarchical linear regression analysis is used to test the proposed relationships.

The findings indicate that patient safety culture is positively associated with patient safety, process quality and patient satisfaction.

Hospital managers should focus on building a stronger patient safety culture due to its positive relationship with hospital performance.

This is the first study to test these relationships using several objective performance measures and a comprehensive patient safety culture data set that includes a substantial number of respondents per hospital. The study contributes to the literature by explicitly mapping high-reliability organization (HRO) theory to patient safety culture, thereby illustrating how HRO theory can be applied to safety culture in the hospital operations context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between patient safety culture and two attitudinal constructs: affective organizational commitment and structural empowerment. In doing so, the main and interaction effects of the two constructs on the perception of patient safety culture were assessed using a cohort of physicians.

Affective commitment was measured with the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, whereas structural empowerment was assessed with the Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire-II. The abbreviated versions of these surveys were administered to a cohort of 71 post-doctoral medical residents. For the data analysis, hierarchical regression analyses were performed for the main and interaction effects of affective commitment and structural empowerment on the perception of patient safety culture.

A total of 63 surveys were analyzed. The results revealed that both affective commitment and structural empowerment were positively related to patient safety culture. A potential interaction effect of the two attitudinal constructs on patient safety culture was tested but no such effect was detected.

This study suggests that there are potential benefits of promoting affective commitment and structural empowerment for patient safety culture in health care organizations. By identifying the positive associations between the two constructs and patient safety culture, this study provides additional empirical support for Kanter’s theoretical tenet that structural and organizational support together helps to shape the perceptions of patient safety culture.

Despite the wide recognition of employee empowerment and commitment in organizational research, there has still been a paucity of empirical studies specifically assessing their effects on patient safety culture in health care organizations. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical study to examine the relationship between structural empowerment as proposed by Kanter and the culture of patient safety using physicians.