Safety climate tools

Safety Climate Tools - Applications and Misapplications in Healthcare Settings... 

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 ... 

Davies, F., Spencer, R. and Dooley, K. (2001), Summary Guide to Safety Climate Tools. HSE Offshore Technology Report 1999/063. Sudbury HSE Books. 

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. 

O Toole, M.F., Nalhone, D., 2005. Is the Safety Climate a Barometer of Safety Results American Society of Safety Engineers. 

Kines, R, Lappalainen, J., Mikkelsen, K.L., Olsen, E., Pousette, A., Tharaldsen, J., Tomasson, K. and Tomer, M. 2011. Nordie Safety Climate Qnestioimaire (NOSACQ-50) A new tool for diagnosing ooeupational safety elimate. IntemationalJoumal of Industrial Ergonomics, 41(6), 634 6. doi 10.1016/j. ergon.2011.08.004. 

Tumberg, W. and Daniell, W. 2008. Evaluation of a healthcare safety climate measurement tool. Journal of Safety Research, 39, 563-8. 

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. 

Blair, E., and O Toole, M. (2010). Leading measures Enhancing safety climate and driving safety performance. Professional Stfety, 55(8), 29-34. 

Heaith and Safety Climate Survey Tool (electronic publication) HSE Books 1998 ISBN 978 0 7176 1462 2... 

Health and Safety Executive, Health and Safety Climate Survey Tool (Diskette), HSE Books, Sudbury (1998)... 

The US Department of Energy, Human Performance Improvement Handbook, Volume II, has several surveys and tools that can be used to aid in defining the organizational safety climate, human performance gap analysis tool, and a job site condihons self-assessment (Volume 2 Human performance tools for individuals, work teams, and management, human performance improvement handbook, 2009). 

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. 

Byron, N., Corbridge, X, (1997). A tool to assess aspects of an organizations health safety climate. In Proceedings of International Conference on Safety Culture in the. 

There are various safety climate assessment tools available which allow employers and responsible persons to assess the state of their safety culture. These normally take the form of staff questionnaires which can be used along with tangible indicators of safety culture (see 4.3 below). 

The research into safety culture has led to the use of safety climate measurement tools as a Safety Performance Indicator (Guldenmund, 2000) but the results are largely intangible and may not help organizations identify where they need to focus attention in order to improve safety (Sorenson, 2002). The lack of a generally accepted definition for safety culture or safety chmate also limits their usefulness as concepts since they do not support a systemic methodology for their measurement (Zhang et al., 2002). 

For several reasons, measuring tools which are purely injury-related do not do a good job of representing the quality of the performance effort or the safety climate in an organisation. 

This hypothetical case history of a fictitious healthcare organization is a heuristic device to illustrate the execution of a planned change in safety climate and organizational culture and to demonstrate some of the ways leaders can systematically use the tools presented here to improve both patient and employee safety. This sketch draws on BST s experience with numerous interventions in a variety of settings, including healthcare. 

The themes of the safety culture and the safety climate are among the most popular subjects for publications in scientific journals specialising in industrial risks (and risks in public services, transportation and medicine). Most of the articles and books propose tools to evaluate the culture, especially questionnaires. 

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... 

Consider the three sides of "The Safety Triad" I introduced in Chapter 2 (see Figure 2.2). One side is for environment, including tools, equipment, engineering design, climate, and housekeeping factors. Another side of this triangle stands for behavior, the actions everyone did or did not perform related to an incident. The third side represents person factors, or the internal feeling states of the people involved in the incident—their attitudes, perceptions, and personality characteristics. 

In this chapter and the previous one we outlined an eight-step process for leading effective changes in organizational culture to improve safety and illustrate some of the ways leaders can use the tools explained in this hook. In the next chapter we will explore how this process helped NASA change its climate and culture after the space shuttle Columbia tragedy in 2003. 

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