Safety Culture in Healthcare

Safety culture is related in large part to how effectively staff communicate and work together and whether staff listen to patients’ needs and concerns. A good patient safety culture should make a healthcare organisation less vulnerable to incidents and accidents. Safety culture assessment needs to gather as many perceptions as possible; instead of generalizing perceptions, we need to find differences in the perceptions of the safety culture being assessed – mixed methods help us to achieve this

Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been paraphrased as, “the way we do things around here.” Individual organizations, and even departments within organizations, develop their own culture over time.