Assessment of patient safety culture in two emergency departments in Australia: a cross sectional study

Patient safety culture is a vital element to create patient safety in healthcare organisations. Emergency department (ED) professionals operate in unstable conditions that may pose risk to patient safety on day-to-day basis. The aim of this study was to assess the status of patient safety culture and to quantify the dimensions of safety culture in the ED setting.

This was a descriptive cross sectional study that used a validated questionnaire distributed to the staff working in the nominated EDs . Perceptions on various dimensions of safety culture were reported and the frequency of positive responses for each dimension was calculated.

“Teamwork” is the only dimension that rated positive by over 70% of participants. Other dimensions rated below 50%, except for “Organisational learning–continuous improvement” which rated 51.2%. Areas that rated the lowest were “Handover and transitions”, “Staffing”, “Non-punitive response to error” and “Frequency of event reporting” with average positive response rate of 15.4%, 26%, 26.8% and 27.6%, respectively.

This study displayed a concerning perceptions held by participants about the deficiency of patient safety culture in their EDs. Moreover, it provided a baseline finding giving a clearer vision of the areas of patient safety culture that need improvement.