A Study on Patient Safety Culture among Nurses in a Tertiary Care Hospital of Puducherry

Patient safety culture is an important measure in assessing the quality of health care. There is a growing recognition of the need to establish a culture of hospital focused on patient safety. The current study aimed to assess the Nurses Perception of Safety culture in their respective working units.

The study was conducted in a tertiary care hospital of Puducherry among 141 randomly chosen nurses. Hospital Survey on Patient Safety culture Questionnaire was used to collect data regarding safety culture among nurses. Collected data were analysed using SPSS using appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics.

The mean age of the subjects was 30.2 years. Of the total 9 dimension assessed to measure the safety culture; team work within units was rated positively by 80.2% of the subjects followed by supervisors action prompting patient safety i.e. 74.7%, the least positively rated dimension was non punitive response to Errors i.e.42.7%. Overall Patient safety rating done by nurses revealed only 12.7% of the subjects estimating excellent level of safety culture in their units, whereas majority estimating patient safety culture to be only acceptable i.e. 31.9%. While trying to correlate the overall patient culture rating with the different dimension of safety culture by nurses, a positive correlation existed between every dimension with overall patient safety culture perceived by nurses.

Examining the safety culture of our hospitals can help to identify the existing gap in the system. The current study explored the areas that should be fixed to improve the safety culture of our hospitals. Future studies focused on patient safety events along with patient safety culture may yield more findings.