Development of the pharmacy safety climate questionnaire: a principal components analysis

To develop, and examine the component structure and internal consistency, of a questionnaire designed to assess safety climate in the community pharmacy setting.

998 pharmacists working in community pharmacies in England completed the questionnaire. Item selection was determined by principal components analysis (PCA) which also defined the underlying structure of the questionnaire. Scales were constructed from the items that loaded on components and were tested for internal consistency using Cronbach alpha scores. Pearson correlation coefficients were used to examine inter-component correlations.

A 34-item Pharmacy Safety Climate Questionnaire (PSCQ) was extracted through PCA; seven components were retained which represented the model of choice, and explained 58.3% of the data variance. The components were: investigating and learning from incidents; staffing and management; perceptions of the causes of incidents and reporting; team working; communication; commitment to patient safety; and education and training about safety. The internal consistency for the components was high; Cronbach alpha scores ranged from 0.67 to 0.88.

The PSCQ demonstrated good psychometric properties in terms of its face validity, component structure and internal consistency. Community pharmacies can use this new tool to measure staff attitudes relating to seven safety climate domains, to compare themselves with other pharmacies, to prompt interventions to improve the prevailing safety climate within their organisation, and to measure the effectiveness of these interventions.