Identifying organizational cultures that promote patient safety.

Background: Safety climate refers to shared perceptions of what an organization is like with regard to safety, whereas safety culture refers to employees' fundamental ideology and orientation and explains why safety is pursued in the manner exhibited within a particular organization. Although research has sought to identify opportunities for improving safety outcomes by studying patterns of variation in safety climate, few empirical studies have examined the impact of organizational characteristics such as culture on hospital safety climate.

Purpose: This study explored how aspects of general organizational culture relate to hospital patient safety climate.

Relationship of safety climate and safety performance in hospitals.

Objective: To examine the relationship between measures of hospital safety climate and hospital performance on selected Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs).

Data Sources: Primary data from a 2004 survey of hospital personnel. Secondary data from the 2005 Medicare Provider Analysis and Review File and 2004 American Hospital Association's Annual Survey of Hospitals.

Patient safety climate in 92 US hospitals: differences by work area and discipline.

Background: Concern about patient safety has promoted efforts to improve safety climate. A better understanding of how patient safety climate differs among distinct work areas and disciplines in hospitals would facilitate the design and implementation of interventions.

Objectives: To understand workers' perceptions of safety climate and ways in which climate varies among hospitals and by work area and discipline.

Patient safety climate in US hospitals: variation by management level.

Background: Strengthening hospital safety culture offers promise for reducing adverse events, but efforts to improve culture may not succeed if hospital managers perceive safety differently from frontline workers.

Objectives: To determine whether frontline workers and supervisors perceive a more negative patient safety climate (ie, surface features, reflective of the underlying safety culture) than senior managers in their institutions. To ascertain patterns of variation within management levels by professional discipline.

Front-line staff perspectives on opportunities for improving the safety and efficiency of hospital work systems.

Objective: To contrast the safety-related concerns raised by front-line staff about hospital work systems (operational failures) with national patient safety initiatives.

Data Sources: Primary data included 1,732 staff-identified operational failures at 20 U.S.

Recruitment of hospitals for a safety climate study: facilitators and barriers.

Background: Despite increasing emphasis on safety culture assessment, little is known about the factors that affect hospitals' participation in such studies. Factors affecting recruitment of 30 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals into a study to evaluate perceptions of safety culture, or safety "climate," were examined.

Methods: To minimize selection bias, hospitals were recruited that represented the spectrum of safety performance on the basis of Patient Safety Indicator scores.

An overview of patient safety climate in the VA.

Objective: To assess variation in safety climate across VA hospitals nationally.

Study Setting: Data were collected from employees at 30 VA hospitals over a 6-month period using the Patient Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations survey.

Study Design: We sampled 100 percent of senior managers and physicians and a random 10 percent of other employees.

Workforce perceptions of hospital safety culture: development and validation of the patient safety climate in healthcare organizations survey.

Objective: To describe the development of an instrument for assessing workforce perceptions of hospital safety culture and to assess its reliability and validity.

Data Sources/study Setting: Primary data collected between March 2004 and May 2005. Personnel from 105 U.