For implementers
Why measurement of patient safety culture is important and tools to support measurement at your hospital.
Why measure patient safety culture
Positive patient safety cultures are related to better outcomes for patients and higher levels of satisfaction amongst hospital staff. Systematic measurement of patient safety culture is a tool to better understand patterns of individual and organisational behaviour, as well as underlying beliefs and values in respect to patient safety throughout the organisation. This information can be used by safety and quality teams to target improvements where they are needed most and calibrate success.
Learning from what went wrong
In the maternity service there was virtually no teamwork between midwives, obstetricians and paediatricians. …These midwives endorsed a unidisciplinary rather than a multidisciplinary investigation of incidents, and a lack of external scrutiny resulted in problems and issues not being identified, or if identified not being resolved. Defensive blame-shifting behaviour predominated in response to incidents, with minimal dissemination of lessons learnt in order to improve the clinical standards
Kirup Inquiry, Morecambe, 2015
Patient safety inquiries provide an insight into the potentially catastrophic impact dysfunctional workplace cultures can have on patient care.
Crucially, measurement is not only beneficial to detect situations where things go wrong, but also to observe the settings where safe care is delivered consistently over time. Recognising the environment and conditions conducive to good patient safety is pivotal to a proactive approach to healthcare improvement.
Benefits of a positive safety culture
The culture of the hospital affects everyone who walks through its doors. Some of the benefits of a positive patient safety culture are articulated below.
| For patients | For hospital staff | For leaders |
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‘When the culture is good you hear it from patients– they feedback that you can feel that it is a nice environment’
Hospital executive interview, 2019
The patient safety culture measurement toolkit
The Commission has developed the patient safety culture measurement toolkit to support hospitals to measure and improve on patient safety culture.
The toolkit steps hospitals through the process of undertaking a project using measures of patient safety culture and includes information on:
- Measures of patient safety culture
- Project rationale and planning
- Running the survey
- Analysis and reporting
- Feedback, action planning and intervention.
The toolkit also includes a range of tools and templates to support hospitals through the process.