Occupational worker wellness and safety climate are key determinants of healthcare organizations' ability to reduce medical harm to patients while supporting their employees. We designed a ...longitudinal study to evaluate the association between work environment characteristics and the patient safety climate in hospital units.
Primary data were collected from Norwegian hospital staff from 970 clinical units in all 21 hospitals of the South-Eastern Norway Health Region using the validated Norwegian Work Environment Survey and the Norwegian version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. Responses from 91,225 surveys were collected over a three year period. We calculated the factor mean score and a binary outcome to measure study outcomes. The relationship between the hospital unit characteristics and the observed changes in the safety climate was analyzed by linear and logistic regression models.
A work environment conducive to safe incident reporting, innovation, and teamwork was found to be significant for positive changes in the safety climate. In addition, a work environment supportive of patient needs and staff commitment to their workplace was significant for maintaining a mature safety climate over time.
A supportive work environment is essential for patient safety. The characteristics of the hospital units were significantly associated with the unit's safety climate scores, hence improvements in working conditions are needed for enhancing patient safety.
Aim of study was to document 1) that patient safety culture scores vary considerably by hospital department and ward, and 2) that much of the variation is across the lowest level organizational ...units: the wards. Setting of study: 500-bed Norwegian university hospital, September-December 2006.
Data collected from 1400 staff by (the Norwegian version of) the generic version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ Short Form 2006). Multilevel analysis by MLwiN version 1.10.
Considerable parts of the score variations were at the ward and department levels. More organization level variation was seen at the ward level than at the department level.
Patient safety culture improvement efforts should not be limited to all-hospital interventions or interventions aimed at entire departments, but include involvement at the ward level, selectively aimed at low-scoring wards. Patient safety culture should be studied as closely to the patient as possible. There may be such a thing as "hospital safety culture" and the variance across hospital departments indicates the existence of department safety cultures. However, neglecting the study of patient safety culture at the ward level will mask important local variations. Safety culture research and improvement should not stop at the lowest formal level of the hospital (wards, out-patient clinics, ERs), but proceed to collect and analyze data on the micro-units within them.
Measuring staff perceptions with safety climate surveys is a promising approach to addressing patient safety. Variation in safety climate scores between work sites may predict variability in risk ...related to tasks, work environment, staff behavior, and patient outcomes. Safety climate measurements may identify considerable variation in staff perceptions across work sites.
To explore variation in staff perceptions of patient safety climate across work sites in Norwegian General Practitioner (GP) practices and Out-of-hours clinics.
The Norwegian Safety Attitudes QuestionnaireAmbulatory Version (SAQ A) was used to survey staff perceptions of patient safety climate across a sample of GP practices and Out-of-hours clinics in Norway. We invited 510 primary health care providers to fill out the questionnaire anonymously online in October and November 2012. Work sites were 17 regular GP practices in Sogn & Fjordane County, and seven Out-of-hours clinics, of which six were designated as "Watchtower Clinics". Intra-class correlation coefficients were calculated to identify what proportion of the variation in the five factor scores (Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Perceptions of management, and Working conditions) were at work site-level.
Of the 510 invited health care providers, 266 (52%) answered the questionnaire. Staff perceptions varied considerably at the work site level: intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs) were 12.3% or higher for all factors except for Job satisfaction-the highest ICC value was for Perceptions of management: 15.5%.
Although most of the score variation was at the individual level, there was considerable response clustering within the GP practices and OOH clinics. This implies that the Norwegian SAQ A is able to identify GP practices and OOH clinics with high and low patient safety climate scores. Patient safety climate scores produced by the Norwegian version of the SAQ A may, thus, guide improvement and learning efforts to work sites according to the level of their scores.
The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) is one of the most widely used instruments to assess safety culture among healthcare providers. The ambulatory version of the SAQ (SAQ-AV) can be used in the ...primary care setting. Our study objective was to examine the underlying factors and psychometric properties of the Dutch translation of the SAQ-AV in out-of-hours primary care services.
Cross-sectional observational study using a web-survey.
Sixteen out-of-hours general practitioner cooperatives and two call centers in the Netherlands.
Primary healthcare providers in out-of-hours services.
Item-descriptive statistics, factor loadings, Cronbach's alpha scores, corrected item-total correlations, scale correlations.
The questionnaire was answered by 853 (43.2%) healthcare professionals. In the factor analyses, 784 respondents were included; mainly general practitioners (N = 470) and triage nurses (N = 189). Items were included in the analyses based on question type and results from previous studies. Five factors were drawn with reliability scores between .49 and .86 and a good construct validity. The five factors covered 27 of the 62 questionnaire items, with three to five items per factor.
The Dutch translation of the SAQ-AV, with five factors, seems to be a reliable tool for measuring patient safety culture and guide quality improvement interventions in out-of-hours primary care services. The Dutch factor structure differed from the original SAQ-AV and other translated versions. In future studies, the questionnaire should be validated further by examining if there is a relationship between the responses on the SAQ-AV, patient experiences, and the occurrence of adverse events.
Patient safety culture in Norwegian nursing homes Bondevik, Gunnar Tschudi; Hofoss, Dag; Husebø, Bettina Sandgathe ...
BMC health services research,
06/2017, Letnik:
17, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Patient safety culture concerns leader and staff interaction, attitudes, routines, awareness and practices that impinge on the risk of patient-adverse events. Due to their complex multiple diseases, ...nursing home patients are at particularly high risk of adverse events. Studies have found an association between patient safety culture and the risk of adverse events. This study aimed to investigate safety attitudes among healthcare providers in Norwegian nursing homes, using the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire - Ambulatory Version (SAQ-AV). We studied whether variations in safety attitudes were related to professional background, age, work experience and mother tongue.
In February 2016, 463 healthcare providers working in five nursing homes in Tønsberg, Norway, were invited to answer the SAQ-AV, translated and adapted to the Norwegian nursing home setting. Previous validation of the Norwegian SAQ-AV for nursing homes identified five patient safety factors: teamwork climate, safety climate, job satisfaction, working conditions and stress recognition. SPSS v.22 was used for statistical analysis, which included estimations of mean values, standard deviations and multiple linear regressions. P-values <0.05 were considered to be significant.
Out of the 463 employees invited, 288 (62.2%) answered the questionnaire. Response rates varied between 56.9% and 72.2% across the five nursing homes. In multiple linear regression analysis, we found that increasing age and job position among the healthcare providers were associated with significantly increased mean scores for the patient safety factors teamwork climate, safety climate, job satisfaction and working conditions. Not being a Norwegian native speaker was associated with a significantly higher mean score for job satisfaction and a significantly lower mean score for stress recognition. Neither professional background nor work experience were significantly associated with mean scores for any patient safety factor.
Patient safety factor scores in nursing homes were poorer than previously found in Norwegian general practices, but similar to findings in out-of-hours primary care clinics. Patient safety culture assessment may help nursing home leaders to initiate targeted quality improvement interventions. Further research should investigate associations between patient safety culture and the occurrence of adverse events in nursing homes.
Safety climates are perceptions of safety culture shared by staff in organizational units. Measuring staff perceptions of patient safety culture by using safety climate surveys is a possible way of ...addressing patient safety. Studies have documented that patient safety climates vary significantly between work sites in hospitals. Across-ward variations in the measurements of safety climate factor scores may indicate ward-specific risk of adverse events related to patient care routines, work environment, staff behaviour, and patient results. Variation in patient safety climates has not yet been explored in nursing homes.
To investigate whether the Norwegian translation of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire-Ambulatory Version is useful to identify significant variation in the patient safety climate factor scores: Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Working conditions, Stress recognition, and Perceptions of management, across wards in nursing homes.
Four hundred and sixty three employees from 34 wards in five nursing homes were invited to participate. Cronbach alphas were computed based on individual respondents' scores on the six patient safety climate factor scores. Intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated by multilevel analysis to measure patient safety climate variance at ward level.
Two hundred and eighty eight (62.2%) returned the questionnaire. At ward level Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for the factors were 10.2% or higher for the factors Safety climate, Working conditions and Perceptions of management, 2.4% or lower for Teamwork climate, Job satisfaction, and zero for Stress recognition. ICC for variance at nursing home level was zero or less than one per cent for all factor scores.
Staff perceptions of Safety climate, Working conditions and Perceptions of management varied significantly across wards. These factor scores may, therefore, be used to identify wards in nursing homes with high and low risk of adverse events, and guide improvement resources to where they are most needed.
The aim of the study was to assess the reliability and construct validity of the Croatian translation of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire-Ambulatory version (SAQ-AV) in the out-of-hours (OOH) ...primary care setting. A cross-sectional observational study using anonymous web-survey was carried out targeting a convenience sample of 358 health professionals working in the Croatian OOH primary care service. The final sample consisted of 185 questionnaires (response rate 51.7%). Psychometric properties were assessed using exploratory hierarchical factor analysis with Schmid-Leiman rotation to bifactor solution, McDonald's ω, and Cronbach's α. Five group factors were identified: Organization climate, Teamwork climate, Stress recognition, Ambulatory process of care, and Perceptions of workload. Items loading on the Stress recognition and Perceptions of workload factor had low loadings on the general factor. Cronbach's α ranged between 0.79 and 0.93. All items had corrected item-total correlation above 0.5. McDonalds' ω total for group factors ranged between 0.76 and 0.91. Values of ω general for factors Organization climate, Teamwork climate, and Ambulatory process of care ranged between 0.41 and 0.56. McDonalds' ω general for Stress recognition and Perceptions of workload were 0.13 and 0.16, respectively. Even though SAQ-AV may not be a reliable tool for international comparisons, subsets of items may be reliable tools in several national settings, including Croatia. Results confirmed that Stress recognition is not a dimension of patient safety culture, while Ambulatory process of care might be. Future studies should investigate the relationship of patient safety culture to treatment outcome.
Patient safety culture involves leader and staff interaction, routines, attitudes, practices and awareness that influence risks of adverse events in patient care. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire ...(SAQ) is an instrument to measure safety attitudes among health care providers. The instrument aims to identify possible weaknesses in clinical settings and motivate quality improvement interventions leading to reductions in medical errors. The Ambulatory Version of the SAQ (SAQ-A) was developed to measure safety climate in the primary care setting. The original version of the SAQ includes six major patient safety factors: Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Perceptions of management, Working conditions, and Stress recognition. Patients in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to adverse events. We present the psychometric properties of the Norwegian translation of the SAQ-A for the nursing home setting.
The study was conducted in five nursing homes in Tønsberg, Norway, in February 2016. A total of 463 employees working more than 20% received a paper version of the translated SAQ-A adapted to the Norwegian nursing home setting and responded anonymously. Filled-in questionnaires were scanned and transferred to an SPSS file. SPSS was used to estimate Cronbach alphas, corrected item-total correlations, item-to-own and item-to-other correlations, and item-descriptive statistics. The confirmatory factor analysis was done by AMOS.
Of the 463 health care providers, 288 (62.2%) responded to the questionnaire. The confirmatory factor analysis showed that the total model of the six factors Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Perceptions of management, Working conditions, and Stress recognition had acceptable goodness-of-fit values in the nursing home setting.
The results of our study indicate that the Norwegian translated version of the SAQ-A, with the confirmed six factor model, is an appropriate tool for measuring patient safety climate in the nursing home setting. Future research should study whether there is an association between patient safety climate in nursing homes and occurrence of adverse events among the patients.
How to protect patients from harm is a question of universal interest. Measuring and improving safety culture in care giving units is an important strategy for promoting a safe environment for ...patients. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) is the only instrument that measures safety culture in a way which correlates with patient outcome. We have translated the SAQ to Norwegian and validated the translated version. The psychometric properties of the translated questionnaire are presented in this article.
The questionnaire was translated with the back translation technique and tested in 47 clinical units in a Norwegian university hospital. SAQ's (the Generic version (Short Form 2006) the version with the two sets of questions on perceptions of management: on unit management and on hospital management) were distributed to 1911 frontline staff. 762 were distributed during unit meetings and 1149 through the postal system. Cronbach alphas, item-to-own correlations, and test-retest correlations were calculated, and response distribution analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed, as well as early validity tests.
1306 staff members completed and returned the questionnaire: a response rate of 68%. Questionnaire acceptability was good. The reliability measures were acceptable. The factor structure of the responses was tested by confirmatory factor analysis. 36 items were ascribed to seven underlying factors: Teamwork Climate, Safety Climate, Stress Recognition, Perceptions of Hospital Management, Perceptions of Unit Management, Working conditions, and Job satisfaction. Goodness-of-Fit Indices showed reasonable, but not indisputable, model fit. External validity indicators - recognizability of results, correlations with "trigger tool"-identified adverse events, with patient satisfaction with hospitalization, patient reports of possible maltreatment, and patient evaluation of organization of hospital work - provided preliminary validation.
Based on the data from Akershus University Hospital, we conclude that the Norwegian translation of the SAQ showed satisfactory internal psychometric properties. With data from one hospital only, we cannot draw strong conclusions on its external validity. Further validation studies linking the SAQ-scores to patient outcome data should be performed.
Harvest site infections after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) are a known complication which represent a serious problem for patients and an increased cost of health care. There is a ...discrepancy in routine care regarding use of a graduated compression stocking on the leg with the saphenous vein harvest site. Some wards apply a compression stocking postoperatively to all in-hospital patients, others do not. The deep vein thrombosis prevention effect of compression stockings is well documented, but there are no studies of their possible preventive effect on harvest site infections.
Our purpose was to examine whether the use of a graduated compression stocking for 4-6 weeks after CABG reduced the incidence of surgical wound infection at harvest sites.
Data on 377 consecutive CABG patients (September 2011-December 2012) were collected from the hospital's patient registry and Surveillance System for Surgical Site Infections. Logistic regression was used to determine the odds of surgical site infection in patients at two surgical wards adhering to opposite practices regarding the use of compression stocking (stocking group n=296, no-stocking group n=155).
No significant relationship was found between post-operative infection rate and compression stocking routine.
In this 'natural experiment' no evidence was found that the use of a graduated compression stocking reduced the incidence of harvest site surgical wound infection. As the treatment of most Norwegian CABG patients involves the use of a graft leg compression stocking, a randomised controlled trial (RCT) is called for to decide which treatment is better.
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