You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 23, Issue 2
  • ‘Not another safety culture survey’: using the Canadian patient safety climate survey (Can-PSCS) to measure provider perceptions of PSC across health settings

Article Text

Article menu
Original research
‘Not another safety culture survey’: using the Canadian patient safety climate survey (Can-PSCS) to measure provider perceptions of PSC across health settings
  1. Liane R Ginsburg1,
  2. Deborah Tregunno2,
  3. Peter G Norton3,
  4. Jonathan I Mitchell4,
  5. Heather Howley4
  1. 1School of Health Policy and Management, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  2. 2School of Nursing, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
  3. 3Department of Family Medicine (Emeritus), University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
  4. 4Accreditation Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  1. Correspondence to Dr Liane R Ginsburg, School of Health Policy and Management, York University, HNES Bldg. Rm 413, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3; lgins{at}yorku.ca

Abstract

Background The importance of a strong safety culture for enhancing patient safety has been stated for over a decade in healthcare. However, this complex construct continues to face definitional and measurement challenges. Continuing improvements in the measurement of this construct are necessary for enhancing the utility of patient safety climate surveys (PSCS) in research and in practice. This study examines the revised Canadian PSCS (Can-PSCS) for use across a range of care settings.

Methods Confirmatory factor analytical approaches are used to extensively test the Can-PSCS. Initial and cross-validation samples include 13 126 and 6324 direct care providers from 119 and 35 health settings across Canada, respectively.

Results Results support a parsimonious model of direct care provider perceptions of patient safety climate (PSC) with 19 items in six dimensions: (1) organisational leadership support for safety; (2) incident follow-up; (3) supervisory leadership for safety; (4) unit learning culture; (5) enabling open communication I: judgement-free environment; (6) enabling open communication II: job repercussions of error. Results also support the validity of the Can-PSCS across a range of care settings.

Conclusions The Can-PSCS has several advantages: (1) it is a theory-based instrument with a small number of actionable dimensions central to the construct of PSC; (2) it has robust psychometric properties; (3) it is validated for use across a range of care settings, therefore suitable for use in regionalised health delivery systems and can help to raise expectations about acceptable levels of PSC across the system; (4) it has been tested in a publicly funded universal health insurance system and may be suitable for similar international systems.

  • Safety Culture
  • Evaluation Methodology
  • Patient Safety
  • Accreditation

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2013-002220

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Supplementary materials

    • Supplementary Data

      This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

      Files in this Data Supplement: