Determination of patient safety attitude and affecting factors of health workers in emergency department

Purpose: The object of the research is to determine the patient safety attitude and factors affecting the health workers (physician, nurse, emergency medical technician and personnel) of the emergency department. Method: The research was executed with a total of 151 health workers, involving 72 nurses, 36 doctors, 15 emergency medical technicians and 28 personnel who agreed to work in adult and pediatric emergency departments of a university hospital in İzmir between May 2019 and July 2019. In this descriptive research, the data were collected with the "Individual Information Form" and the "Patient Safety Attitude Scale", and statistical analyzes were conducted for the research questions using SPSS STATISTIC 22.0 package program. Independent t test was used for comparison of two independent groups and one-way ANOVA was used for comparison of independent multi-group comparisons. In cases where parametric test assumptions were not met, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis tests were applied respectively. When there was a significant difference in multiple comparisons, LSD and Bonferroni corrected paired comparisons were made. Findings: The mean score of the health workers participating in the study from the patient safety attitude scale was 146.39 ± 24.87. When the sub-scale of the scale were examined, the highest score belonged to the teamwork sub-scale (41.47 ± 7.51) and the lowest score to the stress definition sub-scale (13.87 ± 3.93). It was determined that there is a significant difference between the security climate sub-scale and the occupational, educational level, occupational year and emergency working year variables of health workers. A significant difference was found between job satisfaction, teamwork, security climate, management perception, working conditions sub-scales and scale total according to the variables whether or not to receive training on patient safety and whether or not they found themselves sufficient. Conclusion: Patient safety attitudes of health workers in emergency department are moderately positive. In order to increase patient safety attitudes of all health workers, it was suggested to organize training programs on patient safety and to repeat the trainings. Keywords; Patient safety, patient safety culture, attitude, emergency department.