ABSTRACT
This chapter describes three stages in a study from Scotland on hospital safety culture, designed to provide an initial measurement and to transfer the findings back to the risk managers of the hospitals involved. The stages are assessment, evaluation, and feedback. The chapter identifies the main challenges encountered and key lessons learnt for each stage. Several instruments have been developed to assess hospital staff’s perceptions of aspects of workplace safety culture and a number of studies have reported associations between hospital safety culture and safety outcome measures. When healthcare workers’ safety behaviours were assessed through observational techniques, Zohar et al. showed both group and hospital level culture as predictors of the future safety behaviours, observed in a sample of 955 nurses in Israel. In order to identify areas of organisational culture that could be targeted to improve patient safety in Scottish hospitals, a safety culture survey was conducted.
