Measuring safety culture attitude of health professionals at King Narai Hospital, Lop Buri Province, Thailand

Abstract

The objectives of this of study were to describe and compare the characteristics of perception in terms of attitude on existing safety culture among health professionals both on themselves and on health team of King Narai Hospital. It was a cross-sectional study with a total of 380 respondents comprising of physicians, dentists, registered nurses, technicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, academicians, and dieticians. Data collection was from January-February 2012. The research tool was the survey questionnaire from Hospital Survey On Patient Safety Culture authorized by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the United States of America, and the Thai version from the Clinical Research Collaboration Network jointly with the Research for Quality. This study earned the ethics committee’s approval for research in human at King Narai Hospital on 30 December 2011. Descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation) was employed for data analysis and inferential statistics of One-way ANOVA was used to test the relationship between independent and dependent variables. The result revealed that, over all, the 8 categories of health professionals had positive attitude on safety culture with no difference. The highest mean was the dimension of learning organization or continuous development, mean score was (3.89 ± 0.60) while the dimension of staffing had the lowest mean (3.10 ± 0.74). The health professional category with the most positive attitude was registered nurses while pharmacists were the least. The level of highest acceptance for patient safety was 55.52%. Future research should take into consideration other groups working at the Hospital and should not be limited only to health professionals. The acquired information should be used to encourage the executives for serious participation and for making an improvement. It should also be used to issue the policy so as to urge the Hospital’s personnel to be aware of safety both for themselves and for service receivers/patients. This would serve as the deep-rooted culture aimed to reduce various potential risky situations for continuous improvement with purposive goals. It would also help promoting safety culture, bringing about quality culture, and enabling learning culture in the future.