Culture of Patient Safety from Nurse's Perspective

Patient safety is a major concern for health care organizations. The first step to improve culture of patient safety is its assessment. Accordingly this study was performed with the aim of assessing culture of patient safety from nurses’ perspective in the hospitals affiliated to Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences. It was a descriptive cross-sectional study. The sample consisted of 190 nurses working in educational hospitals of Hormozgan province who were recruited by stratified random sampling in 2012. Data was collected by Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture questionnaire (HOSPIC) and analyzed by independent T. test, one-way ANOVA and Post hoc test of LSD using SPSS- PC (v. 16). Among the different dimensions of patient safety culture, the lowest score was related to the number of employees and its related issues (40.25%) and the highest score was related to team work in the unit (85.60%). In the past 12 months, 63 nurses (35.7%) did not report any errors and 53 nurses (30.1%) reported only 1 or 2 error. Significant differences was seen between the score of different dimensions of patient safety culture and nurses’ work experience, the type of employment, hospitals, and the amount of working hours (p <0.05). Regarding the findings, it is suggested that managers and policy makers identify the factors involved in patient safety culture and improve the working environment, and promote supportive organizational climate in hospitals. Farther research is needed to detect the causes of nurse's failure to report medical errors.