Patient Safety Observation by Nurses Working in the Intensive Care Units of Selected Hospitals Affiliated to Yasuj University of Medical Sciences

Patient safety is a major component of healthcare quality that is defined as avoiding, preventing and correcting the damage and undesirable consequences caused by the process of healthcare provision. The likelihood of occurrence of medical errors and untoward events is maximized in intensive care units (ICUs) due to the complexity of patient conditions and treatment process. The present study was conducted to determine the degree to which nurses observe the safety of patients hospitalized in the ICUs of selected hospitals affiliated to Yasuj University of Medical Sciences, Yasuj, Iran. The present descriptive study observed 2106 nursing caregivers associated with patient safety who were selected using purposive event-based sampling. The morning shift performance of 54 nurses working in three ICUs of selected hospitals affiliated to Yasuj University of Medical Sciences, Yasuj, Iran was investigated in winter 2016 using a researcher-made 39-item checklist comprising six subscales. After confirming its reliability and face and content validity using the intraclass correlation coefficient, the checklist was completed by the researcher observing the performance, and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The findings obtained found the mean degree of conformity between nursing care associated to patient safety and the checklist to be 53.43 out of 100 (undesirable). The maximum degree of conformity was associated to blood transfusion subscale with a mean score of 89.52 (desirable), and the lowest was associated to surgical complications with a mean score of 23.3 (undesirable). Nursing care associated to patient safety provided in ICUs is substandard. Healthcare administrators are therefore strongly recommended to conduct regular audits and make efforts to promote care-giving processes, and hospitals authorities are urged to perform reforms and hold consistent training programs to improve the performance of the staff, especially nurses.