Patient Safety Culture Essay

INTRODUCTION

In order to achieve a high quality of healthcare delivery, the standard of care must be viewed in various perspectives. Apart from acknowledging patient’s perception of the healthcare delivery standard, it is also important to understand how patient safety is cultivated in an organization. Research showed that, the safety and efficient care require all these elements to be well integrated and coordinated (1).

As we can see nowadays, the elements of Patient Safety Culture (PSC) have been an important dimension in any of the quality assessments for a healthcare organization in order to achieve awards and recognitions by the accreditation bodies, be it locally or internationally (2).The concept of PSC sparkled substantially upon

A positive PSC is said can improve the quality of care as it is able in lowering the rate of medical errors in an organization (5).

Internationally, the World Health Organization had launched the ‘World Alliance for Patient Safety’ in 2004, while at the country level, Agency of Healthcare Research in Quality (AHRQ) in the US, National Patient Safety Agency in the UK and Australia Commission of safety and quality has been inaugurated.

The urge in measuring patient safety culture has led to the development of various tools. The example of these tools are Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) (6), Patient Safety Culture in Healthcare Organization (PSCHO) (7), Manchester Patient Safety Assessment Framework (MaPSaF) (8) and Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) (9).

Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) is an assessment tool that developed by the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). It is used as a standard tool to measure patient safety culture in the US. This tool is widely used in the other countries too and has undergone translation and validation in more than 20 languages all over the world