St. Joseph's Community Hospital of West Bend, a member of SynergyHealth, recognized the opportunity to improve patient safety through facility design. An independent, nonprofit, 80-bed acute hospital located in West Bend, WI, St. Joseph's Community Hospital is in the unique position of deciding to relocate and build a new hospital rather than remodel an existing facility. Sparked by the 1999 In...

BACKGROUND The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture was designed to assess staff views on patient safety culture in hospital settings. The purpose of this study was to examine the multilevel psychometric properties of the survey. METHODS Survey data from 331 U.S. hospitals with 2,267 hospital units and 50,513 respondents were analyzed to ...

BACKGROUND Patient safety culture is an integral aspect of good standard of care. A good patient safety culture is believed to be a prerequisite for safe medical care. However, there is little evidence on whether general education can enhance patient safety culture. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to assess the impact of a standardized patient safety course on health care worker patient safety culture....

Nationally, there is strong interest in measuring hospital performance in patient safety. The Leapfrog Group uses a survey, along with other data sources, to calculate patient safety scores for 2600 hospitals across the United States. Under this methodology, every hospital is assigned 1 of 5 letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) depending on how the hospital stands in safety performance relative to all...