Safety climate strength: a promising construct for safety research and practice

Despite some notable advances in patient safety (eg, an average 17% reduction across a set of hospital-acquired conditions including adverse drug events and urinary tract infections in the USA between 2010 and 20151), substantially reducing or eliminating harm remains elusive for nearly every healthcare organisation. One consistent recommendation for becoming harm-free is developing a strong safety climate or shared employee perceptions that safety is organisationally rewarded, supported, valued and prioritised relative to other organisational goals.2 3 Safety climate is closely related to safety culture in that the former represents perceptions of leader actions and organisational practices reflective of the underlying basic assumptions and beliefs comprising culture.4 Ginsburg and Oore,5 like much of the research in healthcare, focus on safety climate and its measurement through surveys. There is growing empirical evidence in healthcare that safety climate matters to multiple indicators...
Source: BMJ Quality and Safety - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research