Culture of Safety
The concept of safety culture can be defined as the behaviors and core values that arise through a continuous and collective commitment of a company’s leadership and managers to emphasize safety over competing goals (“Culture of Safety”, 2016). The culture of safety originated far beyond the health care sector, in organizations that minimized adverse events regardless of the complex and hazardous work that they conducted. These organizations have maintained a commitment to safety across all its workers from frontline providers to executives. The safety culture acknowledges the high-risk nature of activities in an organization and encourages collaboration to seek solutions to safety problems.
Provider surveys across all levels measure the culture of safety. Some of these surveys include Safety Attitudes Questionnaire and Patient Safety Culture Surveys of AHRQ (“Culture of Safety”, 2019). The providers use these surveys to rate the safety culture in their respective unit and the company as a whole. Poor safety culture is connected to increased error rates. Specific measures such as developing safety teams, teamwork training, and executive walk rounds have been linked to improvements in measurements of safety culture, and low error rates cultural issues are now being addressed through structured communication methods and rapid response teams. However, their effect on the culture of safety is not yet proven.
Achieving a safety culture is a local problem. There are wide variations in how a culture of safety is perceived in a single organization (“Culture of Safety”, 2019). For instance, the perception of safety culture can be high in one unit and low in another or can be low among frontline employees and high among the executives. These differences influence the interventions intended to improve the culture of safety. So, it is the responsibility of organizational leadership to get attentive to the problems facing the frontline workers and understand the norms that guide behavior. Numerous determinants of the culture of safety are dependent on local situations, so changing the safety culture happens at the microsystem level.
References
Culture of Safety. ANA. (2016). Retrieved 7 August 2020,
from https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/work-environment/health-safety/culture-of-safety/#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20’culture%20of%20safety’%3F&text=A%20’culture%20of%20safety’%20describes,emphasize%20safety%20over%20competing%20goals.
Culture of Safety. Psnet.ahrq.gov. (2019). Retrieved 7 August 2020, from
https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/culture-safety.