Lately, ?Patient Safety? has become one of the most important issues in healthcare reform worldwide.
Considerations like to keep medical mistakes to the minimum, to enhance patient safety during receiving treatments, and to create a new clinic environment safer than ever before to the general public are some prominent targets to aim at currently by many countries zealously promoting this issue. International and domestic literature on relevant studies pointed out that organizational culture was the key factor for medical institutions to upkeep of the idealism of patient safety, and thus actively formulating a so-called ? Patient Safety Culture? has become the number one task of those institutions engaging in the campaign.
In this study we went through a questionnaire survey using a special form named ?Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture? that was originally constructed and developed by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the USA and then introduced and translated into Chinese by Mr. ??? in 2005 as a viable tool for this kind of study. Our chosen study subjects were the entire rank and file staff of certain regional teaching hospital in Central Taiwan. One at a time, we interviewed them separately to find out the status quo of safety culture of that individual hospital worker. Altogether we have given out 1,025 copies of the questionnaire during the study and recovered 757 of them with legitimate answers (an effective recovery rate of 73.9%).
After careful data verification and analytical steps, we came up with the following principal conclusions and recommendations:
1. Major conclusions:
(1) Generally speaking, all the interviewed healthcare workers scored ?better than average? in their recognition and outcome of patient safety culture. However, in two particular facets of the issue, namely ? Nonpunitive Response to Error? and ?Hospital Handoffs & Transitions,? their knowledge appeared to be not that ideal.
(2) It seemed that worker with higher seniority would score more positively in terms of recognizing patient safety culture.
(3) Executive personnel scored more positively in both recognition and outcome of patient safety culture than non-executives did.
(4) Physicians scored lower in recognition and outcome of patient safety culture than the rest healthcare workers.
(5) Contracted workers from outside the institution scored lower in both recognition and outcome of patient safety culture than regular or official employees of the institution.
(6) The more positive the healthcare worker was in his or her recognition of patient safety culture, the better he or she would
perform in the safety culture outcome as well.
2. Recommendations to the individual hospital studied:
(1) Preferring encouragement instead of punishment to build up a good notification environment.
(2) Inspecting the course of work shift transfers to correct incidents of operational mistakes, missing out, and deficiencies.
(3) Agglomerating the recognition of all individual staff members and also to reinforce the executive?s motivation.
(4) Inducing everyone?s willingness to participation and enhancing the improving rate leading toward patient safety.
(5) Cooperation can make one group invincible, so promoting teamwork by all means.
(6) Aiming at physicians in particular to establish a new concept of patient safety.
3. Recommendations for future studies:
(1) Enlarging the range and scope of study by adding more other influential variables.
(2) Designing vertical study scheme to make certain the causation relationships between all variables.
