Safety Culture Provision of Healthcare Recipients among Healthcare Providers of Primary Health Centers in Karaj

Safety is one of the principles of patient care and is a vital component of quality management. The first goal of a health care organization is preventing injuries during treatment, and thus preventing endangering patient safety. Thus, the objective of this study was to investigate the safety culture among the primary health centers in Karaj.

This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed with participation of 164 health care providers, who worked in 20 Karaj health centers that were selected via simple random selection from 41 primary health centers in 2017-2018. A modified version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture and a demographic questionnaire were used. Central and dispersion statistics were used for data description via SPSS software version 21.

The mean (SD) total score of positive patient safety culture was 64.7 (9.9), minimum score was 36.4 and maximum score was 89.2. Among the dimensions of patient safety culture, the highest scores were related to the within-unit teamwork dimension with mean (SD) of 80.3 (17.1) and head of center support for patient safety with mean (SD) of 76.1 (16.6) and the lowest score was for the non-punitive response to error dimension with mean (SD) of 33.3 (18.8). As many as 99 (63.1%) health care providers rated their workplace in this regard as excellent and very good, 48 (30.6%) considered it acceptable and 10 (6.3%) reported inadequate and poor workplace safety.

The study indicated that the scores of patient safety culture among health care providers have increased in all its dimensions except for teamwork across units of health care, compared to the previous study. Among the dimensions of patient safety culture, the highest score was related to the within-unit teamwork and head of center support for patient safety, and the lowest score was to the non-punitive response to error