Transforming safety culture in neonatal intensive care teams

Healthcare organisations face widespread challenges in optimising their safety culture, especially amid conflicting stakeholder needs, staffing shortages and increasing acuity of patients. McMaster University Children's Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit developed a safety culture programme that prioritises the needs of patients, hospital staff and learners altogether.

The safety culture programme and activities revolve around six primary drivers: psychological safety, provider well-being, equity, diversity and inclusion, teamwork and communication, organisational learning and leadership. We describe how these drivers influence safety culture, the ongoing activities being implemented, stakeholder feedback and contextual factors. We evaluated the maturity of our safety culture using the Manchester Patient Safety Framework (MaPSaF) questionnaire.

MaPSaF assessments were conducted three times over 4 years. Most domains of safety culture in MaPSaF maintained their position despite COVID-19 while some indicators declined or have been maintained.

We provide a framework for implementing a safety culture programme that addresses the needs of diverse stakeholders. Transformation of the safety culture takes time and the failure to improve the patient safety measures over the period may be attributed to rapidly increasing workload and worsening patient acuity. These challenges underscore the imperative of balancing transactional and transformational projects to preserve a safety culture.