Health care professionals’ attitudes regarding patient safety: cross-sectional survey

Abstract

BackgroundPatient safety is being seen as an increasingly important topic in the healthcare fields, and the rise in numbers of patient safety incidents poses a challenge for hospital management. In order to deal with the situation, it is important to know more about health care professionals’ attitudes regarding patient safety. This study looks to describe health care professionals’ attitudes regarding patient safety, and whether differences exist based on the background factors of study participants.MethodsA quantitative study using a questionnaire was conducted in three multi-disciplinary hospitals in Western Lithuania. Data was collected in 2014 from physicians, nurses and nurse assistants.ResultsThe results showed positive safety attitudes, and these were especially related to the respondents’ levels of job satisfaction. A respondent’s older age was associated with how they evaluated their teamwork climate, safety climate, job satisfaction, and perception of management. Profession, working unit, length of work experience, information received about patient safety during education, further education, and working shifts were all associated with several safety attitude areas.ConclusionsThe safety attitudes of respondents were generally found to be positive. Attitudes related to patient safety issues were positive among health care professionals and opens the door for the open discussion of patient safety and adverse events. However, in future we also need to investigate the knowledge and skills professionals have in relation to patient safety, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the present situation.

Patient safety: knowledge, influence and attitude among physicians: an exploratory study

“…Attaining high attitude toward patient safety among three quarters of current study participants is a positive finding-a higher percent than that reported by Almaramhy et al, around 50% [17]. This also goes in accordance with Brasaite et al's study which found that in general health care professionals had positive attitudes to patient safety [21]. Similarly, higher positive attitudes were reported in Flotta et al in Italy ranging from 87 to 98% on different items among the participants [20].…”

Patient Safety Climate and Its Affecting Factors Among Rehabilitation Health Care Staff of Hospitals and Rehabilitation Centers in Iran-Tehran

“…In our study, educational level had no variation effect on any factor (P>0.05). Brasaite et al illustrated the effects of education on some aspects of patient safety climate like management perceptions but not the safety climate [12]. Females (mean score: 3.28) and males (mean score:3.6) had differences in communication with physicians (P=0.07).…”

“…March 2019, Volume 17, Number 1 sential role in providing safe care services and that they need to have positive safety attitudes [12].…”

Safety attitudes, perceived organizational culture and knowledge of the physiologically deteriorating patient among mental health nurses: Cross‐sectional, correlational study

“…In linear regression analysis, those with more than five years’ registration experience had significantly poorer safety attitudes on the working conditions subscale, and scores approaching significance on the teamwork climate subscale. Previous research about the relationship between level of experience and safety‐related attitudes in healthcare is mixed with no clear consensus (Brasaite et al, ; Lambrou et al, ; Sissakos et al, ). While we could postulate that our results might, for example, be explained by a tendency towards vigilance on the part of relatively inexperienced staff and of relative complacency on that of their experienced colleagues, this would be largely speculative.…”