Measuring Patient Safety Culture should be part of good practice. It makes good sense to know if and how, patient safety can be improved.

A Few of Our Clients

  • Counties Manakau DHB
  • Waikato DHB
  • Waitemata DHB
  • Singapore General Hospital
  • Changi General Hospital
  • National Heart Centre Singapore

Risk Management & Patient Safety Culture Surveys

Free-up management time, staff time and reduce expenditure. Your risk management and the patient safety culture survey works hand-in-hand to ensure staff buy-in to cultural change. Together we can improve patient safety outcomes. A patient safety first culture results in improved quality of care, reduced mortality rates and other preventable adverse outcomes.

International events and research, including our own work, clearly shows that Culture plays an important part in patient safety. Improving patient safety requires everyone’s involvement. Yet studies have shown that staff are often reluctant to speak up. Speaking up to question patient safety has little to do with motivation or the lack of it, rather, there are human and workplace culture issues which may be hard to determine but nevertheless exist. This is where we can help as specialist in conducting Patient Safety Culture Surveys.

Patient Safety Culture Surveys

Often organisational culture is the barrier to improved patient safety performance. Just as financial management does not rely on guesswork, patient safety culture – employee beliefs, attitudes and assumptions – must be measured and analysed to eliminate guesswork. Risks to patient safety can be reduced if you know the unique characteristics of your organisation’s culture. So, let’s find out.

Managing Your Risk

Just as managing risk starts at the board level, so too does patient safety. Indeed, it is essential that health organisations understand their current attitudes to risk and patient safety to lay the ground work for improving the quality of care: to reduce mortality rates and other preventable adverse outcomes.

Assessing Patient Safety Culture

We produce evidence-based information from our safety surveys, enabling your organisation to determine where best to spend its time and money to activate workplace cultural change. The critical questions asked relate to:

  • “Why does a particular safety culture exist?”
  • “What impact is it likely to have on patient safety outcomes and employee performance”
  • “How do you build a mature safety culture?”

 

If an organisation is to understand its own strengths and weaknesses and make informed strategic choices, it must at some point study and understand its own culture.
Edgar Schein

Professor

The difficult aspect of safety culture is that it exists at three levels (see below). Levels One and Two are easy to see, easy to measure with tick-the-box audits, and relatively easy to change. It’s Level Three that requires deep understanding and expertise.
Concordia helps you measure and understand your organisation’s patient safety culture so that cost effective and informed improvements can be targeted on aspects that will transform performance, quality, and engagement. Concordia uses a Patient Safety Culture Survey, internationally validated and with proven reliability for understanding patient safety culture. It is structured around patient safety outcomes and factors that clearly show where there are strengths and risks. The survey is inexpensive, accurate and easy to answer. The survey includes opportunities for free text comments and these help to form a complete picture of employee perceptions about patient safety. Our action planning process is designed to engage your employees to help them design their own improvement processes, ensure these are relevant and best of all, build staff buy-in to an improved culture focused on patient safety first.