Concept analysis of safety climate in healthcare providers

Abstract

Aim and objective: To report an analysis of the concept of safety climate in healthcare providers.

Background: Compliance with safe work practices is essential to patient safety and care outcomes. Analysing the concept of safety climate from the perspective of healthcare providers could improve understanding of the correlations between safety climate and healthcare provider compliance with safe work practices, thus enhancing quality of patient care.

Design: Concept analysis.

Data sources: The electronic databases of CINAHL, MEDLINE, PubMed and Web of Science were searched for literature published between 1995-2015. Searches used the keywords 'safety climate' or 'safety culture' with 'hospital' or 'healthcare'.

Method: The concept analysis method of Walker and Avant analysed safety climate from the perspective of healthcare providers.

Results: Three attributes defined how healthcare providers define safety climate: (1) creation of safe working environment by senior management in healthcare organisations; (2) shared perception of healthcare providers about safety of their work environment; and (3) the effective dissemination of safety information. Antecedents included the characteristics of healthcare providers and healthcare organisations as a whole, and the types of work in which they are engaged. Consequences consisted of safety performance and safety outcomes. Most studies developed and assessed the survey tools of safety climate or safety culture, with a minority consisting of interventional measures for improving safety climate.

Conclusion: More prospective studies are needed to create interventional measures for improving safety climate of healthcare providers. This study is provided as a reference for use in developing multidimensional safety climate assessment tools and interventional measures.

Relevance to clinical practice: The values healthcare teams emphasise with regard to safety can serve to improve safety performance. Having an understanding of the concept of and interventional measures for safety climate allows healthcare providers to ensure the safety of their operations and their patients.

Keywords: concept analysis; healthcare organisations; healthcare providers; safety climate.