[The initiative of patient safety culture and its development]

Safety culture is the culture of all the connotations to a safe direction for the purpose of advancing a unified organizational behavior. Safety culture was first introduced to the field of medicine by the American researchers in the 1990s. Subsequently, researchers from different countries initiated the relevant studies and put forward five subcultures of patient safety culture. At present, the patient safety culture research is mainly conducted in the United States, China and the UK of which cross-sectional studies are the most popular study designs including the evaluation of patient safety scale, reliability and validity analysis. Non-sectional studies are focused on the study of subcultures including leadership, communication, cooperation and reports. Compared with the studies abroad, the studies on patient safety culture in China are rather late, yet also mainly on reliability and validity analysis of scales. Most participants we investigated are nurses from teaching hospitals. But in the real healthcare situation, fostering a positive safety culture is still very lacking and many ideas and behaviors are in the state of traditional blaming culture.