It is inevitable that healthcare workers throughout their careers will witness actual or potential threats to patient safety in the course of their work. Some of these threats will result in serious harm occurring to others, whilst at other times such threats will result in minimal harm, or a ‘near miss’ where harm is avoided at the last minute. Despite organizations encouraging employees to ‘s...

BACKGROUND 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. METHODS Data collected from 1400 staff by (the Norwegian version of) the generic version o...

BACKGROUND It is evident within Canada and abroad that healthcare is a high-risk industry not unlike aviation, nuclear energy and offshore oil drilling. The results from the Canadian Adverse Events Study (Baker et al. 2004) found an adjusted adverse event rate of 7.5% in Canadian hospitals. The consequences of these adverse events include prolonged length of stay, varying degrees of injury, and...

BACKGROUND Patient safety is a critical component to the quality of health care. As health care organizations endeavour to improve their quality of care, there is a growing recognition of the importance of establishing a culture of patient safety. In this research, the authors use the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) questionnaire to assess the culture of patient safety in Tai...

Objective: Since organizational culture could act as a tool to socialize employee value, this study explores the relationship between organizational culture and patient safety management, with the purpose of identifying which culture could benefit from the implementation of patient safety. Method: Based on the theory of Competing Values Approach, this study adopted four categories of organizati...