Safety climate differences

Interestingly, one application of the HSPSC involved an adaptation for the petroleum industry to conduct a comparative study of safety climate differences between healthcare and petroleum industries (Olsen 2010 Olsen and Aase 2010). To oirr knowledge this is the first time that a cross-industry study has used a tool originally developed for the hospital setting. 

Olsen, E. and Aase, K. 2010. A comparative study of safety climate differences in healthcare and the petroleum industry. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 19(Suppl. 3), i75-i79. 

Singer, S.J., Gaba, D.M., Falwell, A. etal. (2009) Patient safety climate in 92 US hospitals differences by work area and discipline. Medical Care, 47(1), 23-31. 

While the focus of almost all studies included in this chapter was the adaptation of a patient safety cUmate measure from the USAto their own national and healthcare contexts, maity of the questions we will have to answer in future might be better addressed at a cross-national level. At the level of the survey instmment this would require a certain amount of consistency regarding the use of terminology and the addition or removal of items - a minimal shared item set. Taking cross-national similarities and differences into account (especially with regard to internal consistencies of the various safety climate dimensions) might help to improve further the overall quality of the HSPSC and to further our understanding of factors at the level of healthcare systems that may have a considerable impact on safety climate. 

Compared with other types of analysis techniques, benchmarking does not have any predictive power to anticipate future performance, results, or benefits (Holloway, Lewis and Mallory 1995, 148). Although great care may have been taken in the analysis of other companies and the activities they developed to reach certain performance levels, there is no guarantee that those same activities will yield the same results in another organization. The differences may be due to a number of reasons, including a perceived cause and effect between performance and the activities that really does not exist, differences in the organizations safety climates, and differences in the exposure levels to various hazards in the workplace. 

Although it is not our intention to go into the concepts of safety climate and culture in any depth, it is worth mentioning them as they have received considerable attention in the safety literature. The distinction between the concepts of climate and culture is not clear. Indeed, a review of the two concepts (Rousseau, 1988) found considerable overlap. Despite this, the review concluded that there were sufficient differences between the two concepts for one to be differentiated from the other. Climate, it was suggested, was a descriptive term that applied to the sum of individual... 

Safety climate has been defined in slightly differently ways by different workers in the field. However, there does appear to be a general consensus as to its nature. The following definition will suffice as an example ... 

Criterion 3—Level of detail adequate for the development of hypotheses on the overall intervention. The level of detail (Mohaghegh and Mosleh, 2009 Cagno et al., 2014) of factors depends on the importance attached to the different dimensions of the factors in terms of their impacts on the model output. For example, there are two possible approaches to make a cause-to-effect interaction between the human resource system and safety climate . The modeller can consider these two factors as global factors. On the other hand, he/she can establish multiple relations between the human resource system and different dimensions of the safety climate (e.g., perception of the reporting system , perception of training , etc.). The latter is modelled with a higher level of details (Cagno et al., 2014). In our... 

Nmnerous approaches to the measurement of safety climate have been proposed although not all have been subject to any meaningful attempts at vahdation and there are often differences in emphasis. Davies et al. (2001) provides an excellent comparison of six proposed measures of safety chmate. 

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