Relationship between Safety and Staff Performance in Hospital

Background and Objectives: Mental and physical safety is one of the most important needs of human beings, and the administrators of each community should specifically care about it. Meanwhile, hospitals, which themselves are health care providers, are in no way an exception to this rule. Thus, hospital administrators are expected to take the issues related to physical and mental safety of staff and patients into consideration. The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between hospital safety and staff performance of Imam Khomeini Hospital, Tehran/Iran. Methods: This is a correlational study. The statistical population included all employees of the hospitalization wards of Tehran Imam Khomeini Hospital (n = 200), who were selected by simple random sampling method (n = 65). Data collection was done using a questionnaire consisted of three sections; the first section for collecting demographic data, the second to measure the safety of the hospital (the independent variable), and the last one to measure the performance of employees (the dependent variable). Pearson's correlation test was used to test the correlations. Findings: The results indicated that there is a significant relationship between the safety of the hospital and each of the factors affecting the staff performance. "Quality" indicator shows the strongest correlation with safety followed by "cost", "accountability", "discipline" and "quantity". “Time” showed the weakest correlation with the safety performance indicators. In general, there was a significant correlation between the hospital safety and the employees’ performance. Conclusions: Given the significant relationship between hospital safety and staff performance, the more the principles of safety are observed in a hospital, the better will become the staff performance.