Barriers to improving safety culture

The description of how safety climate tools, walk-rounds and the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist have been implemented in healthcare has identhied some of the challenges to measuring and improving culture in healthcare teams and organisations. Other important barriers to improving safety culture exist ... 

In summary, currerrt trairring and education create another barrier to improving safety culture because they do not support the development of shared norms and behaviours across different professional groups. Rather they create professional silos. The net effect of the current training approach is that doctors and nurses carmot walk in each other s shoes. Handovers, where multi-disciplinary team input is needed to commimicate safety information across healthcare interfaces, illustrate this issue very well. All too often, nurses seek nursing information and doctors want to hand over a clinical management plan in which key information required by the nurses is not included. 

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