Critical Thinking Assignment: Research Paper

5

Patient Safety Culture in hospitals.

Student’s Name

Course

Instructor’s name.

Institutional Affiliation

November 11, 2021.

Patient Safety Culture in hospitals.

Overview.

Patient safety culture entails the shared values among organization members that promote safety within the organization. To achieve a patient safety culture, all members within the organization must understand the beliefs, norms, and values of what is important, and the attitudes and behaviors related to patient safety (Alquwez et al., 2018). Healthcare organizations' culture should emphasize addressing discrepancies in the quality of care to protect patients from harm. Safety and quality are the key issues establishing and providing responsive, accessible, and effective health systems. Insecure patient care increases the mortality and morbidity rates which demands timely intervention. Medical errors are among the leading causes of injury, readmissions, or death globally.

A healthcare facility that embraces patient safety culture maintains safety as its top priority. Healthcare leaders should show commitment by supporting their respective organizations in understanding near misses and errors, inspecting and identifying errors and their causes, developing strategies to prevent the occurrence of errors, and training their staff to recognize the importance of raising their concerns. Risk managers are vital in leading the organization towards achieving a safety culture. Patient safety culture helps an organization focus on identifying and mitigating errors fundamental to risk management (Danielsson et al., 2017).

Background.

The first step in defining and refining a safety culture is conducting an assessment of patient safety culture in the hospital (Carvalho et al., 2017). Accreditation organizations require the assessments within their standards to enable hospitals to assess issues such as managerial actions, teamwork, leadership and administration support to patient safety, incidents reporting, staffing challenges, and related issues. The assessment allows organizations to have a clear view of the areas to focus their efforts on as part of the strategies to strengthen patient safety culture. In addition, it can help hospitals benchmark their results against comparable strategies implemented within their international level or country.

Before developing and implementing a patient safety culture, an organization should first diagnose the existing culture and state to identify areas of strength and their weaknesses. The most efficient tool is the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) which is based on 12 dimensions of safety (Ali et al., 2018). The most efficient strategy to achieve a patient safety culture is improving error reporting in the healthcare organization, intentional incident reporting improves safety culture by increasing event feedback and communication. Timely feedback stimulates the development and implementation of a patient safety culture if it is focused on specific departments and if the outcomes are clear for intended users.

Explanation of the research topic.

The research topic is the patient safety culture among healthcare professionals in public hospitals. The research question: what is the patient safety culture among healthcare professionals in public hospitals? The study aims at assessing patient safety culture among healthcare providers in public hospitals. The Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) will be used to collect information from the selected sample of healthcare professionals. The study targets physicians, nurses, dentists, health officers, ophthalmologists, midwives, psychiatrists, physiotherapists, pharmacists, occupational and environmental health officers, anesthetists, radiology, and laboratory staff.

Ethical Consideration

Ethical approval will be obtained from the research ethics committee and official permission letters obtained from respective public hospitals. Informed consent will be obtained from all participants. The research will not require any name or identification, and the participants have a right to choose whether to participate or not.

References

Ali, H., Ibrahem, S. Z., Al Mudaf, B., Al Fadalah, T., Jamal, D., & El-Jardali, F. (2018). Baseline assessment of patient safety culture in public hospitals in Kuwait. BMC Health Services Research, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-2960-x

Alquwez, N., Cruz, J. P., Almoghairi, A. M., Al-otaibi, R. S., Almutairi, K. O., Alicante, J. G., & Colet, P. C. (2018). Nurses’ perceptions of patient safety culture in three hospitals in Saudi Arabia. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 50(4), 422-431. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12394

Carvalho, R. E., Arruda, L. P., Nascimento, N. K., Sampaio, R. L., Cavalcante, M. L., & Costa, A. C. (2017). Assessment of the culture of safety in public hospitals in Brazil. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 25(0). https://doi.org/10.1590/1518-8345.1600.2849

Danielsson, M., Nilsen, P., Rutberg, H., & Årestedt, K. (2017). A national study of patient safety culture in hospitals in Sweden. Journal of Patient Safety, 15(4), 328-333. https://doi.org/10.1097/pts.0000000000000369