Determining of patient safety culture perception of surgeon nurses: An application in Afyonkarahisar

Patient safety is known as a practice towards preventing errors, elimination of the injuries and death caused by health care itself. Patient safety culture as well, is the acceptance of making patient safety a top priority and a common value among the institution. The purpose of this study is to detect the perseption of the surgical nurses operating in the province of Afyonkarahisar over patient safety culture. Surgical nurses operating in the province of Afyonkarahisar are forming the population of our research. Sampling was not taken as our method but also a full census was conducted by reaching entire surgical nurses working in the surgical wing. According to this, questionnaires collected from 121 surgical nurses were assessed. Our research may be defined as a descriptive study by revealing the current status about patient safety culture. "Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture" questionnaire is used to collect data. The data is analyzed within SPSS for Windows software programme and individual spresifications of the nurses are submitted with frequency and percent distribution but also described with arithmetic avarage and standard deviation rates. Comparision for the patient safety culture perseptions affected by the individuality of the nurses, t-test is chosen for two groups and for over two groups analyses of variency method is chosen. In this study, the perceptions of nurses over patient safety culture is overviewed in five dimensions (working unit, administration, communication, reporting and general patient safety); overall perception within each dimension is detected to be in moderate level. At the same time, nurses working in state hospitals are found in a more negative perception other than nurses working in private hospitals. On the other side, nurses under the age of 20 are determined to have higher perception including the dimensions of working unit, communication and reporting on patient safety culture. Also nurses single and from the countryside are found to be more positive in the dimensions of working unit and reporting on patient safety culture. ICU (intensive care unit) nurses are found to have a more negative perseption than nurses in general surgery and operating rooms. In conclusion, detection of the perseptions on patient safety culture from nurses working in our medical agencies would allow a description on a cognitive level for the subject. Key words: Surgical nurses, patient safety;patient safety culture