Examining the relationship between healthcare workers' perceptions of barriers to reporting adverse events and their attitude towards reporting adverse events: The case of Gümüşhane State Hospital

The aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of healthcare professionals working at Gümüşhane State Hospital towards unwanted incident reporting processes and the individual, institutional and systemic barriers affecting these attitudes. Unwanted incident reporting, which is of critical importance in terms of strengthening the patient safety culture, is considered as a strategic tool to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents by revealing the causes of errors in health services. However, it appears that healthcare professionals' participation in the reporting process is limited due to various obstacles. The population of the study consists of healthcare professionals working at Gümüşhane State Hospital. In this context, 390 people consisting of volunteer participants were reached for the research. As the data collection tool, a structured survey form consisting of three sections was used. The first part of the survey includes socio-demographic information; the second part contains statements measuring healthcare professionals' attitudes regarding adverse event reporting. The third section contains scale items aimed at identifying individual, institutional, and systemic reporting barriers. Data were collected through face-to-face and online methods, and descriptive statistics and comparative tests were used in the analyses. Research findings show that the incident notification attitude levels of health workers are at a high level and the barriers for incident notification are at a low level. It was found that the average attitude of the participants who were midwives among health workers to the notification of incidents was higher than the participants who were other health workers. As a result of, the increase in the average level of incident reporting barriers among healthcare workers leads to a decrease in incident reporting attitudes.