Promoting safety culture through health-care professional-patient relationship's improvement

promoting patient safety culture is a strategic priority and converges towards improving quality of health care. The healthcare professionals-patient relationship is an essential concept of patient safety culture. However, the increase of patient safety awareness is still delayed in Tunisia.

to assess and analyze the healthcare professional-patient relationship level among all healthcare professionals' categories in university hospital centre (UHC)FarhatHached, Sousse¬ Tunisia in order to further direct our strategies.

We carried out a descriptive cross-sectional study among healthcare professionals at our UHC. The French version of the "Hospital Survey On Patient Safety Culture" was adopted, and self-administered to 319 care providers, including 116 physicians and 203 paramedical personals.

Response rate was 90.5% (289/319). The overall mean score for positive perception of the explored domain was 58.4%. However, physicians reported significant higher percentage of positive responses than paramedical staff (69.7% versus 53.4%; p=0.01). Positive perception was notified by 83.5% of all healthcare professional regarding to item relative to "adverse events may affect the relationship of trust between physician-patient", it was significantly higher among  physicians compared to paramedics (97.7% versus 77.4% ; p<10-4).

Dimension concerning healthcare professional-patient relationship was poorly developed among health care professionals in our hospital. Thus, it is crucial to improve this situation and to create a well-balanced healthcare professional-patient relationship based on partnership and taking into account individual factors.