Patient Safety: Assessing Nurses' Perception and Developing an Improvement Plan

patients' safety is a core value of healthcare service. A positive patient safety culture contributes to the environment necessary to maintain patient safety and avoid needless patient deaths. The impact of medical errors has been widely reported. The traditional blame and shame culture in healthcare organization have been criticized for being largely responsible for causing medical errors and obstructing the possibility of learning from those errors. Employees' perceptions about safety are important because organizations with strong safety culture consistently report fewer workplace injuries and fewer harmful events than do organizations with weak safety culture. The study aims to assessing nurses' perceptions of patient's safety culture at medical and paediatric hospitals and developing an improvement plan to enhance patient safety at the study settings. The study was conducted in tow university hospitals using a descriptive design. Sample: 148 nurses (120 staff nurses and 28 head nurses) were included in the study. Tools of the study included 1) Interview questionnaire sheets were used to collect the participants' characteristic data, 2) The Hospital Survey of Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC) developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ (2004). Results: nurses perceive patient safety culture more positive. There were statistically significant differences between perception of nurses working in critical care units and perception of nurses working in general wards in two dimensions. There were a statistically significant differences between perception of the staff nurses and perception of head nurses in all items related to patients' safety except organizational learning. The highest percentages of the nurses working in the general wards and critical care units scored their hospital as very good (59.5% & 33.7%, respectively). While half of the head nurses scored the hospital as acceptable (50%). The highest percentage of the staff nurses (34.2%) reported no events related to patients safety over the past 12 months. No correlation was found between head nurses age and perception of patient safety culture, while there was a positive weak correlation between staff nurses' age and their perception. Conclusion: nurses perceive patient's safety culture more positively. There was a statistically significant difference between nurses working in critical care units and nurses working in general wards. Head nurses perceived the patient's safety culture more positively than staff nurses did. The majority of the nurses did not report events related to patient's safety. Non-punitive environment scored high negative responses. Recommendation: nurses need to be encouraged to improve the reporting events related to patients' safety. Further studies are needed for testing the reliability of the suggested developed improvement plan and accordingly implementing it at the study settings. [Neamatallah Goma Ahmed, Samia Mohamed Adam and Iman Ibrahim Abd Al-Moniem. Patient Safety: Assessing Nurses' Perception and Developing an Improvement Plan. Life Science Journal. 2011;8(2):53-64] (ISSN:10978135). http://www.lifesciencesite. com.