Patient safety culture and measurement methods

Although the new global concept of patient safety in our country, as in the past three years, comes on the agenda in the context of national policies. Studies in Western countries shows that, ability to provide safe health care service in the health care institutions in creating positive patient safety culture is the primary requirement . Organizations applies patient safety culture surveys to asses, the effectiveness of the patient safety program and effort to improve patient safety culture, whether the event over the years, the development of the enterprise culture of patient safety.In this study, organisational culture, safety, patient safety concept, the primary tools used to asses the health institutions in the patient safety culture has been revised. In addition, it?s been look through, quality management, risk management and corporate culture concepts and relationships with each other; which is necessary to the institutions, for, patient safety culture improvement functions. Patient safety culture aimed at measuring the shape, development methods, and the strengths, weaknesses, original research tools that distinguishes the benchmarks and try to find out, if the additive effects of the these tools in developing safety culture. At the last part, Turkey's national healthcare quality policy ', historical development and patient safety culture measurement studies, which are performed by Turkish researchers , has been reviewedMethod: Relevant database scanned for articles ; measurement of patient safety, safety culture, (Turkish and English) that the words Medline, Pubmed, viiGoogle Scholar publications until June 2012. At the same time, the relevant institutions web sites were involved in the research. Studies, using the terms safety climate instead of safety culture and the lack of uniformity of the concepts, hasn't been able to do a comparison.The patient safety culture surveys that revised at this paper, not directly asses, patient safety culture. Most of them asses the lower layers of the culture, like, attitude , perception and safety climate. Safety culture to be difficult and complex to measure directly because of the researchers the culture layers by evaluating the idea of his reign All of these surveys resulting assessments, patient safety survey was applied to health institution which detects how employees brings out depending on the dimensions. Individual attitude and perception is located in the innermost section of the layers of the safety culture hierarchy. It is not stable, easy changes. Flexible. Climate is the organizationwide safety culture brings out how has been detected.. At this point, two emerging topic of discussion: First, How reliable, that kind of survey results because of the lack of stable measurement. Institutions, to achieve desired objectives or measure the effectiveness of patient safety programs, what they envision for improvement activities, perform these types of surveys to track data. Organized activities to develop a positive safety culture property focuses on changing the attitudes and of perception employees because of it?s unstable /flexible nature. Whereas, because of the variable nature of perception and attitude of employees, can give misleading results to succeed about the activities.The second topic of discussion, while answering the questions in this survey a comparison point where employees will respond to the scale of the reference is not available. For these reasons the survey results is not interpreted alone . Review with such as the results of the independent audit, patient safety indicators, internal audit, or a number of other parameters monitoring will be more reliable.Keywords: Organisational Culture, Safety Culture, Patient Safety Culture, Safety Climate, Safety Attitude , Safety Climate Assesmet, Safety Culture Survey, Medical Error, Healthcare Quality