Patient Safety: Nurses Perception and Suggestion of an Action Plan

Abstract

Patient safety is a core value of healthcare service. A positive patient safety culture contributes to the environment necessary to maintain patient safety and avoid needless patient deaths. The impact of medical errors has been widely reported. The traditional blame and shame culture in healthcare organization have been criticized for being largely responsible for causing medical errors and obstructing the possibility of learning from those errors. Employees' perceptions about safety are important because organizations with a strong safety culture consistently report fewer workplace injuries and fewer harmful events than do organizations with weak safety culture. The study aims to: Explore nurses' perceptions of the patient safety culture at Medical and Pediatric Hospitals and developing a suggestive action plan to enhance patient safety at the study site. Design: the study is a descriptive study. Sample: a purposeful sample of 148 nurses (120 staff nurses and 28 head nurses) were included in the study. Tools of the study included: 1) Interview questionnaire sheets were used to collect the participants' characteristics data, 2) The Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC) developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quietly AHRQ, (2004). Results: nurses perceive patient safety culture more positive. There were statistically significant differences between the perception of nurses working in critical care units and perception of nurses working in general wards in tow dimensions.T here was a statistically significant difference between perception of the staff nurses and perception of head nurses' in all items related to patient safety except organizational learning, The highest percentages of the nurses working in the general wards and critical units scored the hospital as very good (59.5% & 33.7% respectively). Half of the head nurses scored the hospital as acceptable (50%). The highest percentage of the staff nurses (34.2%) reported no events related to patients safety over the past 12 months. The negative weak correlation was found between staff nurses and perception of patient safety culture while there was a positive weak correlation between head nurses age and their perception. Conclusion: nurses perceive patients safety culture more positively. There was a statistically significant difference between nurses working in critical care units and nurses working in general wards. Head nurses perceived the patient safety culture more positively than staff nurses did. The majority of the nurses did not report events related to patients safety. Non-punitive environment scored high negative responses. Recommendation: Nurses need to be encouraged to improve the reporting of events related to patient safety. Further studies are needed for testing the validity and reliability of the suggested developed action plan and accordingly implementing it at the study sites.