Knowledge and attitudes of pre-hospital emergency health workers towards patient safety and drops

This study was carried out to determine the knowledge and attitudes of pre-hospital emergency ambulance workers regarding patient safety and drops during patient trans-fers. The sample of this descriptive study was constituted by 201 health workers who worked in Pre-Hospital Emergency Health Services in Central town and districts of Tokat prov-ince and participated voluntarily in the study. Research data were collected by Personal Information Form and Safety Attitude Questionnaire. The questionnaire prepared by the researchers via Google-Forms was transmitted to the participants through online net-work links. Research data were analyzed using the SPSS for Windows 25.0 software. The data are presented as frequency, percentage and average. In normally distributed data, two independent groups were compared using independent t-test while one-way analysis of variance was used for comparisons of more than two independent groups. The level of statistical significance was taken as p < 0.05. In the study, 46.3% of the participants were women, 54.2% were 26-35 years old, 18.9% were nurses and 35.3% had work experience between 0 and 5 years. The average total score for the Safety Attitude Scale in the study was 152 ± 26.04. Subscale scores were 33.52 ± 11.16 for the Job Satisfaction, 44.00 ± 8.9 for the Teamwork Climate, 18.63 ± 4.49 for the Safety Climate, 25.28 ± 6.98 for the Perceptions of Management, 15.19 ± 5.51 for the Stress Recognition, and 16.35 ± 5.25 for Working Conditions. It was found that 68.7% of the participants had trouble carrying patients on stretchers, 33.3% witnessed a patient drop, 18% experienced a patient drop event, 12.4% reported drops, and the time of most drops in the ambulance was 42.8% at nighttime and 34.8% at daytime. It was concluded in the study that the patient safety attitudes of pre-hospital emergency health workers were moderate and that health workers needed training. It may be rec-ommended to provide pre-hospital health workers with training on patient safety, to support employees in the reporting of drops and to maintain the transfer vehicles in the ambulance at frequent intervals. Keywords: Ambulance, Drop, Patient Safety, Pre-Hospital Health Workers, Patient Transfer