Improving Patient Safety Culture: A Report of a Multifaceted Intervention

The aim of the study was to improve the safety culture at a Veterans Administration hospital using evidence-based approaches.

We implemented a patient safety summit with follow-up actions. We measured safety climate before and after the summit using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey of Patient Safety Culture with modifications and the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ). The summit brought hospital leaders together to discuss patient safety topics and relate them to our hospital. At the summit's end, hospital workgroups collectively submitted Safety Culture Action forms, indicating their intended actions to improve safety culture. We analyzed all survey results using the χ2 test. We shared lessons learned.

The hospital leadership started safety walk rounds. There were 107 hospital employees at the summit. Attendees submitted 53 Safety Culture Action forms. We received 232 AHRQ survey responses in 2014 and 116 in 2016, for response rates of approximately 11% and 8.9%, respectively. We received 140 SAQ responses (11%) from 1244 employees in 2016 and 242 responses (18%) from 1342 employees in 2017. The AHRQ survey results indicated that perception of teamwork within hospital units improved. The SAQ results indicated that employees' comfort with reporting errors and expressing disagreement with physicians improved, and employees' perceptions of leadership's safety efforts and the levels of staffing worsened.

Although some aspects of safety culture improved after the summit and follow-up interventions, others did not. Future interventions should be targeted toward individual microsystems or units and measure safety climate perceptions for intervention recipients exclusively.