Questionnaire Evaluation
Over the past decades, patient safety has been a concern in healthcare facilities and the medical field in general. Research studies indicate that there has been a rapid increase in the number of patient safety incidents in many health facilities, posing a severe challenge to the management and employees as a whole. Thus, in an attempt to understand and mitigate the issues associated with patient safety, it is ideal to first research and learns about the feelings and attitudes of the employees towards patient safety. This paper provides an evaluation of the questionnaire, which was provided for measuring hospital employee attitudes concerning patient safety.
The hospital safety culture considers attitudes towards patient safety as an essential aspect of quality service delivery and positive patient outcome. The safety culture entails components vital for employee or care provider’s attitudes towards health facility factors like safety, work environment, teamwork, and staffing factors. Therefore, the safety culture entails attitudes, beliefs, values, or perceptions and determines the health and safety management of a given health facility. Furthermore, it is believed that the safety culture of a hospital or health facility is common among employees. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the attitudes of the employees towards patient-related safety measures before implementing them (Modak et al. 2007).
Patient safety measures are considered safe if they adhere to the ethical aspects stated under the ANA. There have been millions of reports about patient injury and mortality due to unsafe medical provisions and care in the recent past. Patients have suffered harm and adverse effects of hazardous measures in hospital settings, which can be prevented if the employees are allowed to show their attitudes towards a given measure. Provisions from the board of health care providers require the health care employees to play their role in ensuring patient safety and quality service delivery. However, according to previous literature, reviews indicate that different employees show different attitudes towards patient safety based on their area of specialization, their ages, and gender (Modak et al. 2007). Therefore, there is a need to maintain a safe environment in health care facilities as well as ensure that the practices rendered to the patients are also safe. Health facilities should promote measures and improve the attitudes of employees towards patient safety in all the health care departments regardless of age, gender, and area of specialty.
In evaluating employee attitudes towards patient safety, a questionnaire was used in collecting data. The questionnaire bore questions based on the background information on the existing literature, and an additional instrument was used to measure the attitudes of the sample employees. About 20 background questions explored more on the participants’ backgrounds and their demographic characteristics such as work, where they work, age, education, years of service in healthcare, and gender, among other questions. Furthermore, the questionnaire bore questions concerning the amount of time the participants spend during patient safety training. The final part of the questions on the employees’ attitude towards patient safety questionnaire was the number of adverse patients safety-related incidents thEy have reported over the previous year.
The research employed the SAQ version of data collection because it has six scales vital for measuring employees’ attitudes towards patient safety. The six scales on the SAQ version include team, a safe climate, management perception, job satisfaction, time taken at work, and recognition of stress. The SAQ scale had about 36 items that were answered based on the six-point Likert scale of 1-6 (disagree strongly, disagree slightly, neutral, slightly agree, strongly agree, and not applicable). The SAQ version questionnaire was employed due to its usability. From the previous studies, it has shown excellent psychometric properties as well as a broad potential to implement practices according to results received from its study (Sexton et al. 2006). The healthcare professional validated the instrument used at the regional hospital in the United States (Modak et al. 2007).
In describing the respondents’ characteristics, descriptive statistics were used in the questionnaire. Differences in the components of the employees were tested through ANOVA and HSD (for customarily distributed characteristics) while the Kruskal–Wallis test was used to test the Non-normally character distribution (Kaya et al. 2010). The mean standard (SD) was used in representing data while the SAQ scale items (safety, satisfaction, management, and conditions of work) were calculated through the Cronbach’s alpha. A further analysis was employed in the various departments where the employees worked. These departments/units included internal medicine, the psychiatric unite, the acute department among other hospital units. SPSS data analysis tool was used to analyze the data represented on the questionnaire, where a <.05 A p-value was regarded as significant during the analysis.
The results on the questionnaire showed that most of the healthcare employees have a positive attitude towards patient safety in areas of job satisfaction, a safe climate, team, and conditions of work. However, there were differences concerning the management perception item on the SAQ scale. Tentatively, employees have a positive attitude towards background factors in healthcare facilities. The overall goal of the questionnaire was to examine the attitudes of employees about patient safety. According to the questionnaire measurements, the employees showed a positive attitude towards patient safety, which was in-line with the research studies carried out from the previous questionnaires. However, even though most of the results on the SAQ scale items were correlated with the previous studies, some differences emerged. According to the scale items, age was the primary factor associated with the attitudes of the employees. When comparing young and older employees in a hospital setting, a positive safety score was obtained from employees of between 30 years and 35 years. However, previous studies indicate that older employees have positive attitudes towards patient safety because of their work experience.
Moreover, gender is associated with stress recognition. According to the previous research studies, gender was mainly related to other patient safety attitudes like teamwork, climate, job satisfaction, and conditions of work. The questionnaire was not gender-sensitive; thus, the recorded results.
Interestingly, physicians indicated a higher positive safety attitude towards patient safety as compared to other hospital employees. That implies that teamwork during adverse events is essential to physicians. This is regardless of their working environment. On the contrary, psychiatric professionals marked the lowest attitude towards patient safety, something attributed to their working conditions. It is common for a psychiatric professional to get stressed over the mental states of their patients since they are sometimes subjected to fights and emotional torture from their patients (De Freitas et al. 2011). And since employees at the hospital settings have different perceptions of the safety of a patient, there must be differences, especially in the psychiatric wards.
On the other hand, the employees who showed negative attitudes towards patient safety on the SAQ scale items such as teamwork, safety climate, satisfaction on their jobs, and management perceptions were also recorded. The negative attitudes were because they did not receive any information concerning patient safety when they were undergoing professional training (Brasaite et al. 2015). Besides, employees who were undergoing further training without information on patient safety were associated with negative attitudes. Therefore, from the questionnaire results and indications, one can conclude that education on patient safety is vital among the employees since it determines their attitudes towards patient safety measures.
Conclusively, from the questionnaire, there are indications that the response was good since almost 65% of the participants registered their responses. There might be limitations in the study since the participants came from one region but can be used as a patient safety representative view among the hospital employees in various health facilities across the globe. Thus, the results might be essential in many hospital settings in the United States as well as other regions that use the same criteria and sample population. Therefore, attitudes towards patient safety are positive among hospital employees. This creates a chance for other hospital facilities to discuss patient safety issues openly among their employees. The results indicate that employees’ education on patient safety, working conditions, and job satisfaction are paramount in shaping their attitudes towards patient safety measures. For instance, the psychiatric professionals indicated the lowest or negative attitudes towards patient safety due to the kind of working environment they are subjected to work from as well as their understanding of patient safety. Thus, hospital management must organize patient safety training for their employees to help them understand what is needed in the present situation.
References
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De Freitas GF, Hoga LA, Fernandes Mde F, González JS, Ruiz MC, Bonini BB. Brazilian registered nurses’ perceptions and attitudes towards adverse events in nursing care: a phenomenological study. J Nurs Manag. 2011;19:331–8.
Kaya S, Barsbay S, Karabulut E. The Turkish version of the safety attitudes questionnaire: psychometric properties and baseline data. Qual Saf Health Care. 2010; 19(6):572–7.
Modak I, Sexton JB, Lux TR, Helmreich RL, Thomas EJ. Measuring safety culture in the ambulatory setting: the safety attitudes questionnaire—ambulatory version. JGIM. 2007;22:1–5.
Sexton JB, Helmreich RL, Neilands TB, Rowan K, Vella K, Boyden J, Roberts PR, Thomas EJ. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire: psychometric Properties, Benchmarking Data, and Emerging Research. BMC Health Serv Res. 2006; 6(1):44.