Assessing the Relationship between Risk Management and Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations

Adverse event have become prevalent in medical centers around the globe. The increased number of injuries has resulted to criticisms. In the 21st century researchers and practitioners are striving hard to identify the cause and possible solutions. Most democratic and rich nations have implemented measures regarding medical risk, quality and patient safety management. In sum the aim of this thesis is to facilitate an integrative approach towards monitoring and reporting of risks and raising awareness of patient safety issues. Patient safety can be improved by enhancing safety climate and risk management culture in healthcare organizations. Encouraging healthcare managers to adopt collaborative learning could foster safety climates. We identified different predictors for overall safety climate perception. First, women have higher tendency to adopt safety culture than men. Nurse and doctors practice safety culture more than other healthcare staffs. Blame culture diminishes safety culture which in turn eliminates safety climate. Our results highlight the importance of capturing the impact of different management levels, especially in large hospitals, and differences between professional groups in order to design interventions accordingly. Based on our findings we suggest that medical should adopt managerial patient safety initiatives like education, training and collaborations between team members, risk management approaches that diminished blame culture and attempts to identify, prioritized and manage the associated risk. Keywords: Safety climate; Blame culture; North Cyprus, Adverse event, risk management.