Patient and Employee Safety Events-Are They Related by Common Hospital Unit Factors?

Area of Science:

• Healthcare management
• Occupational safety
• Patient safety

Background:

• Healthcare environments present risks to patients and staff.
• Identifying shared risk factors is crucial for effective interventions.
• Previous research has often examined patient and employee safety separately.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate unit working conditions affecting both patient and provider safety concurrently.
• To identify common risk factors for targeted safety interventions in healthcare settings.

Main Methods:

• Zero-inflated negative binomial models were used to analyze associations between working conditions (e.g., overtime, patient census) and safety event rates.
• Multivariable regression models were employed to explore adjusted effects of these working conditions.

Main Results:

• Patient and employee safety event rates exhibited minimal correlation; units with high rates in one area often had low rates in the other.
• Significant associations were identified between safety events and specific working conditions, though these were inconsistent across indicators and did not uniformly apply to both safety event types.

Conclusions:

• While patient and employee safety event rates are not directly correlated, common influencing factors such as unit group and registered nurse vacancy exist.
• Further research focusing on specific safety outcomes may uncover more definitive causal relationships between working conditions and safety events.