What Do We Know About Patient Safety Culture in Saudi Arabia? A Descriptive Study

Patient safety is described as the prevention and mitigation of medical errors that can result in harm while a patient is receiving care. One important way to improve safety is through improving the patient safety culture in healthcare. The purposes of this study are to evaluate the patient safety culture trend in Saudi Arabia and assess the improvement over time.

This study is a descriptive study that used a retrospective analysis of a national data set for 3 cycles from 2019 to 2022. To generate a baseline and allow comparison of the hospital's survey results with the aggregated findings from the database, the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles were calculated to set the percentage of values.

Our results found that one of the barriers to developing a strong patient safety culture in Saudi Arabia is management support of patient safety, which caused a blame culture. This could explain the absence of improvement in the average percentage of reporting patient safety events for all 3 cycles. On the other hand, a decrease was observed in organizational learning/continuous improvement as well as a reduction in the positive percentage of patient safety ratings in the last cycle. Moreover, areas of strength in all 3 cycles did not reach the 75th percentile, whereas staffing and response to error domains remained the lowest-scoring composites in all cycles.

Our results have determined the percentile of the positive rate that could guide hospitals to improve their culture survey results. More investigations can focus on change over the years in both patient safety culture and the effectiveness of implementing interventions to measure the impact on quality of care.