Assessing Safety Culture

You might ask yourself the following questions regarding the safety culture at a company s place of business or operation  

If the safety culture does not coincide or integrate well with the business approach of the organization, corporation, or company, the indication is that a safety culture does not or only marginally exists. 

A positive safety culture exhibits the following characteristics  

The importance of committed leadership from top to bottom A clear set of explained expectations for line management The involvement of all employees Effective conununication must exist 

The failure to consider and address the safety culture can prove very costly. VISUAL MOTIVATORS 

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Lee, T. and Harrison, K. 2000. Assessing safety culture in nuclear power stations. 

Norden-Hagg, A., Sexton, J.B., Kalvemaik-Sporrong, S., Ring, L. and Kettis-Lindblad, A. 2010. Assessing safety culture in pharmacies The psychometric vahdation of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) in a national sample of commnnity pharmacies in Swedea Biomed Central Clinical Pharmacology, 10, 1-40. 

Item Difficulty (Location Parameter) Each HSOPSC item has five possible response options and thus four location parameters. These are estimates indicating at what point along the patient safety construct that the respondent will shift from one option (say a 1 ) to the next option (say a 2 ) on the Likert scale. This location, then, determines the point where the item s severity in assessing safety culture equals the individual respondent s level of safety culture. 

The need for a valid and reliable instrument to assess safety culture is not restricted to the United States. The AHRQ Hospital SOPS instrument has been widely adopted in over 45 countries around the world and the instmment has been translated into more than 20 languages. It has become the de-facto international survey for measuring safety culture in healthcare. While other industries such as aviation, nuclear power and petrochemicals have been interested in assessing safety culture there is neither a standard nor agreement as to what to measure. However, in healthcare, the AHRQ instmment is a standard and it has created a shared mental model of safety culture that has become almost universal in healthcare throughout the world. 

Madsen, M. D., Andersen, H. B., Itoh, K., Assessing Safety Culture and Climate in Healthcare, in Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare and Patient Safety, edited by P. Carayon, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2007, pp. 693-713. 

The Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture uses provider and staff perspectives to assess their nursing home s safety culture, identify areas where improvement is needed, track changes in patient safety, and evaluate the impact of interventions. The survey also lets researchers assess safety culture improvement initiatives in nursing homes (AHRQ Publication No. 08(09)-0060). 

Advances in Patient Safety New Directions and Alternative Approaches is a four-volume set of 115 articles, which describe patient safety findings, investigative approaches, process analyses, lessons learned, and practical tools to prevent patients from being harmed. It includes articles by AHRQ-funded patient safety researchers on topics such as reporting systems, risk assessment, safety culture, medical simulation, health information technology, and medication safety (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0034). 

Pronovost, P. and Sexton, J.B. (2005a), Assessing safety culture guidelines and recommendations. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 14, 231-233. [DOI 10.1136/qshc.2005.015180]... 

Monitor and assess safety culture. Organizations should continually monitor and assess the state of their own safety cultures. This involves monitoring work activities, assessing the safety conditions within the organizations, and assessing workers perceptions and attitudes toward safety. 

Glendon, Stanton, and Harrison (1994) developed the Safety Culture Questionnaire (SCQ) for assessing safety cultures across the following eight dimensions ... 

Besides accident forms, accident investigations are a tool used to assess safety culture development. An investigation should be part of every accident, incident, or close call file. This investigation can vary tremendously... 

Determining accident trends is an important factor when assessing safety culture. We need to determine where we are, so that we can plan our moves forward. In order to help us determine how well developed our safety culture is, there are a variety of tools. The tool referred to by most as the road map is the accident log. This log truly is like a road-... 

Standardization and Testing". Potency is deterrained by titration of the amount of Hve vims Hi susceptible tissue culture and is mn Hi paraUel with a U.S. standard. Both in vivo and in vitro tests are used to assess safety (17). 

Emissions, estimation of, 596-598 factors, emission, 597-598 mass balance approach to, 596-597 Employee assessment systems, 938 Employees. See also Staffing and achievement of safety culture, 960 characteristics of, and occupational safety and health, 1159-1160 development of, as outcome of leadership, 852-855... 

Employee silence and safety voicing Does the organization have a safety voicing culture Regularly assess safety voicing... 

Developing an objective approach to risk management is as much about the language we use as it is the processes we put in place. Those who have the authority to undertake a safety assessment have a responsibility to wield that power carefully and shrewdly and this can quickly be undermined when one resorts to emotive and reactive language. This is as true for the language of the safety case as it is in the corridor conversations with colleagues. Those who operate in CRM have a duty to propagate objectivity by example and to communicate in a way that drives a safety culture which is not rash but considered. 

Lagging and leading indicators provide little guidance to do with some of the more abstract management elements such as process safety culture and management review. This difficulty is entirely overcome when a management assessment approach is used. 

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