Safety culture perceptions

According to a study in the Journal for Healthcare Quality, hospital nursing measures, including staff turnover and workload, are associated with staffs perceptions of a safety culture. Researchers examined the relationship between staff perceptions of a safety culture and nursing-sensitive measures of hospital performance at nine California hospitals and 37 nursing units. The measures of skill mix, staff turnover, and workload intensity accounted for 22 percent to 45 percent of the variance in safety culture perceptions between units. 

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A third fundamental of IRT is related to invariance, which has two implications. Firstly, the person parameter G (cf Table 8.1) can be estimated from responses by an individual to any set of items with known item characteristic curves (Reise et al. 2005). Secondly, the estimated item slope and location parameters are independent of the sample under study (Reise et al. 2005). This invariance is displayed below, where individuals with low levels (Figure 8.2a) and with high levels (Figure 8.2b) of safety culture perceptions responded to the same item. 

Figure 8.2a Item Characteristic Curves (ICCs) fitted to a group with low levels of safety culture perceptions...

Comparing the ICCs for both items shows that the response options of the HSOPSC item in Figure 8.3a are sensitive (a > 1.35) and will discriminate between individuals with different levels of safety culture perceptions, except for those who choose Strongly Disagree versus Disagree because the estimated difficulty parameter is located below -3 standard deviations. In contrast, the response options of the HSOPSC item in Figure 8.3b are not sensitive (a < 1.35). 

Benchmarking Belgian Safety Culture Perceptions Opportunities, Practical Approach and Experiences... 

Clearly, there is a need to measure sources of variation in safety culture perceptions relating to individual and hospital characteristics within hospitals, in order to implement targeted interventions (Jackson et al. 2010). For instance, it is hypothesised that members with the same educational background share a common set of cultural features. In addition, hospitals comprise many different types of wards and units, with a high diversity in offered services, patient populations, organisational stractures and protocols, which might explain variability inpatient safety culture perceptions. So it can be assumed that safety culture is associated with specific professions and with the levels of complexity and intrinsic hazards associated with healthcare delivered in different work areas (Singer et al. 2009). 

Safety culture perceptions by nurses worit units 75... 

Gilkey, D. P., del Puerto, C. L. Keefe, T., Bigelow, P., Herron, R., Rosecrance, J., Chen, P. (2012). Comparative analysis of safety culture perceptions among homesafe managers and workers in residential construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management,... 

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