Assessment of Pharmacy Department Patient Safety Culture with the Use of Validated Work Environment Survey Indices.

Context: Patient safety culture (PSC) improvement is a strategy that can foster patient well-being. Measuring PSC without using a validated instrument has been proposed.

Objective: To assess the strengths of correlations between the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's validated Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture (CPSPSC) composites and nonvalidated People Pulse (PP) work environment indices.

Design: This was a cross-sectional, anonymous, voluntary survey.

Methods: This survey was conducted online in an ambulatory pharmacy department that had approximately 900 staff members within an integrated health care delivery system. All pharmacy department staff were asked to participate. CPSPSC composites and PP indices were calculated as percent-positive scores (PPS). Thirty-six correlations between PP index and CPSPSC composite PPS were assessed with the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. Correlation strengths were interpreted as very weak (± 0.00 to 0.19), weak (± 0.20 to 0.39), moderate (± 0.40 to 0.59), strong (± 0.60 to 0.79), and very strong (± 0.80 to 1.0).

Results: A total of 429 (47.4%) pharmacy staff participated. Overall, correlations between CPSPSC composites and PP indices' PPS varied widely. Although all correlations were positive and the majority of correlations were statistically significant, no correlations were identified as very strong. Ten correlations were strong, 16 were moderate, 4 were weak, and 3 were very weak.

Conclusion: Although health care system personnel may prefer to measure PSC with a survey instrument that assesses a variety of workplace environment measures, these findings suggest that use of nonvalidated work environment indices will not provide accurate assessment of PSC in a pharmacy department.