Patient Safety Culture: A Meta-analysis of Data from Iranian Hospitals

Patient Safety Culture (PSC) is the essential context for ensuring patients’ safety. While in many countries, nation-wide research has been conducted to identify context-specific PSC factors, there is lack of such large-scale studies in Iran and most researches into PSC are local, limited, and use different methodologies. In the absence of nation-wide research into the field, this study aimed at meta-analyzing the available scattered data to gain insight into priorities associated with development of PSC in Iran. Three major databases of references and abstracts, including PubMed, Google Scholar, Cochrane Library, Magiran, SID and Iranmedex were comprehensively searched. A total of 11 articles exploring PSC in Iran using the standard HSOPS instrument were reviewed. CMA2 standard was adopted for meta-analysis of the literature data. Data were summarized using descriptive statistics. An overall PSC grade of 50.5% was identified for the Iranian health settings. While “Teamwork within hospital units” scored the highest (67.4%), the lowest score was related to “Non-punitive response to error” (32.4%). Nearly 41% of surveyed samples in the publications perceived PSC status in their hospital to be “Very good” and 52.7% reported no adverse events during the past 12 months. Our analysis identified a low PSC grade and adverse event reporting score in the Iranian health settings. “Non-punitive response to error” was found to be the major challenge of developing PSC, hence the priority area for future relevant interventions.