Questionnaires climate

Phipps, D.L., de Bie, J., Heiboig, H., Guenieio, M., Eickhoff, C., Femandez-Llimos, K, Bouvy, M.L., Rossing, C., Mueller, U. and Ashcroft, D.M. 2012. Evaluation of the pharmacy safety climate questionnaire in European community pharmacies. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 24(1), 16—22. 

Ashcroft, D.M. and Parker, D. 2009. Development of the pharmacy safety climate questionnaire A principal components analysis. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 18(1), 28-31. 

Kim Lyngby Mikkelsen is a medical doctor with a PhD in public health epidemiology. He worked for 10 years as a senior researcher in occupational health safety research, focusing on safety culture and climate, on the development of a Nordic safety climate questionnaire and on safety intervention research. Since 2009 his work has been centred on patient safety, including learning from adverse events. 

A safety climate questionnaire was circulated throughout the factory to gain views on a variety of aspects associated with safety culture and the working environment. The survey produced a 70 per cent response rate and the results helped to guide and structure the implementation of this initiative. 

Bolte, C. (1995). Conception and application of a leaning climate questionnaire based on motivational interest concepts for chemistry Instruction at German schools. In D. L. Fisher (ed.). The study of learning environments, Vol. 8 (pp. 182-192). Perlli Curtin University. 

The climate in which the questionnaire was used might raise concern about interpretation of the results. For example, subjects who wished (for whatever reason) to misrepresent the nature and severity of their problems could distort the results (and hence their interpretation), especially if their chemical-test group was fairly small. In addition, as in any cohort study, there was no control of the subjects environments after discharge from the service, so even legitimate complaints associated with exposure to toxic substances could have been due to occupational or accidental exposure to chemical agents, rather than to exposure at Edgewood. 

The two most relevant international and national emissions-trading specialised websites have been visited (Point Carbon and Canalmedioambiental) and relevant documents on the NAP process collected. In addition, structured questionnaires were sent to the individual associations of all the covered sectors, most of which replied in written form. Personal interviews were undertaken with several energy and climate change experts. For reasons of confidentiality of the information requested by some of the interviewed sectors, their responses are integrated in a general manner in this paper, unless their opinion has been made public otherwise (e.g. publication in journals, press releases etc.). 

Other key ideas within the cognitive theories that are often employed within social research are those of values, attitudes and beliefs (Baron et a/. 2006). These elements are often seen as the basic criteria of many social phenomena, including the highly complex concept of culture, although it is attitudes, the inherent disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object/person/ event (Aronson et a/. 2007), that are most frequently used, due to their accessibility through tools such as questionnaires or observed behaviours (Ajzen 2005). In construction, safety management often draws on this way of thinking in the use of safety climate surveys. 

Safety culture (and/or climate) measures may themselves be regarded as proxy measures of safety in the sense outlined above. However, few studies have found these measures to be strongly related to hard risk outcomes such as injuries and accidents (Guldemnund 2000 The Health Foundation 2011). There are several reasons for this apparent lack of correlation. Safety climate or culture is, by definition, shared within a social unit (a work group), but such units are usually ill defined and small. Safety climate or culmre is multi-faceted, and each facet is a constract, as described in the previous sections of this chapter, based on a few items from a questionnaire. Although the reliability and the intra-class correlation for the constructs can be acceptable, repeated measurements are typically infeasible, and when the questionnaire has been applied repeatedly, its responsiveness (the ability of the constract to reliable measure changes over time (de Vet et al. 2011)) is usually not reported but can be expected to be low. At the same time, since... 

Research has been carried out to test the psychometric properties of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire and AHRQ Hospital Safety Culture Survey (Nieva and Sorra 2003 Sexton et al. 2006 Sorra and Nieva 2004). However, there have been important misapplications of survey tools in healthcare. A proliferation of climate surveys now exist, including many where the factor stmcture and construct validity have not been tested. Many hospitals have developed their own bespoke survey tools and these are poorly designed because basic survey design rules have not been followed. One common issue is surveys that do not counter-balance positive and negative statements, thus increasing the risk of response set bias where the... 

Patient safety researchers have developed several surveys to assess patient safety climate, including the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ), AHRQ s Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (SOPS see Chapter 12 for more detailed information), and Patient Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations. Our chapter provides an in-depth examination of the SAQ in terms of what it measures, key findings and limitations and future areas in need of research. 

Weng, R.H., Huang, C.Y., Huang, J.A. and Wang, M.H. 2012. The cross-level impact of patient safety climate on nursing iimovation A cross-sectional questionnaire survey. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 21(15-16), 2262-74. 

A management system promotes safety and defines the route to it. But it is the culture of staff that determines whether or not the route is systematically taken. Methods of measuring an organisation s safety climate or safety culture, based on questionnaires that test the attitudes of members of the organisation, have been developed (e.g. Cooper and Phillips 1994, The Keil Centre 2001). It could be possible to reflect the results of such measurements as levels of risk, and research could be conducted into ways of doing so. This, however, is not within the objectives of this paper and will not be discussed further. 

Likert invented a way to measure climate with a forced choice questionnaire that he administered to employees to find out their perception of how good the company is in the ten areas. He later took the perception survey results and ran correlation studies with things like profitability, return on investment, growth, and other bottom-line figures, invariably coming up with extremely high positive correlation. Apparently, climate determines results [3,4]. We will discuss employee safety perception and how it will affect the operation in more detail in Chapter 17. 

Three months after the training 346 safety attitude questionnaires were administered. At the time of writing there have been 41 returns (response rate of 12 per cent). Insufficient data are eurrently available to allow statistically valid conclusions to be drawn. Interim analysis suggests no significant change in the climates of safety or teamwork. Preliminary data are displayed in Table 19.2. 

De Witte, K., Van Muijen, J. (1994). Organizational Climate and Culture in Europe. A Theoretical and Practical Introduction to the Focus Questionnaire (unpublished working paper). K.U.Leuven V.U. Amsterdam. 

The aim of the study was to measure a number of parameters that make up safety culture. In particular—based on previous literature—parameters such as the existence of safety policies, safety performance, safety climate and other were measured with the use of a survey tool in the form of a questionnaire. 

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