Associations between patient safety culture and workplace safety culture in hospital settings.

BACKGROUND: Strong cultures of workplace safety and patient safety are both critical for advancing safety in healthcare and eliminating harm to both the healthcare workforce and patients. However, there is currently minimal published empirical evidence about the relationship between the perceptions of providers and staff on workplace safety culture and patient safety culture. METHODS: This study examined cross-sectional relationships between the core Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Hospital Survey 2.0 patient safety culture measures and supplemental workplace safety culture measures. We used data from a pilot test in 2021 of the Workplace Safety Supplemental Item Set, which consisted of 6,684 respondents from 28 hospitals in 16 states. We performed multiple regressions to examine the relationships between the 11 patient safety culture measures and the 10 workplace safety culture measures. RESULTS: Sixty-nine (69) of 110 associations were statistically significant (mean standardized ß = 0.5; 0.58 < standardized ß < 0.95). The largest number of associations for the workplace safety culture measures with the patient safety culture measures were: (1) overall support from hospital leaders to ensure workplace safety; (2) being able to report workplace safety problems without negative consequences; and, (3) overall rating on workplace safety. The two associations with the strongest magnitude were between the overall rating on workplace safety and hospital management support for patient safety (standardized ß = 0.95) and hospital management support for workplace safety and hospital management support for patient safety (standardized ß = 0.93). CONCLUSIONS: Study results provide evidence that workplace safety culture and patient safety culture are fundamentally linked and both are vital to a strong and healthy culture of safety.

Summary of the 2020 AHRQ research meeting on 'advancing methods of implementing and evaluating patient experience improvement using consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems (CAHPS®) surveys'.

BACKGROUND: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality held a research meeting on using Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) data for quality improvement (QI) and evaluating such efforts. TOPICS COVERED.: Meeting addressed: 1)What has been learned about organizational factors/environment needed to improve patient experience? 2)How have organizations used data to improve patient experience? 3)What can evaluations using CAHPS data teach us about implementing successful programs to improve patient experience? KEY THEMES: Providers and stakeholders need to be engaged early and often, standardize QI processes, complement CAHPS data with other data, and compile dashboards of CAHPS scores to identify and track improvement. Rigorous study designs are valuable, but much can be learned and accomplished through practical organization-level studies.

Limitations of and Barriers to Using Performance Measurement: Purchasers' Perspectives.

Although health plan performance data are becoming increasingly more available, many purchasers are still not using these data to make their purchasing decisions. In this article, we review barriers that private purchasers face to using performance data. In addition, we consider the effects of the larger health care purchasing environment and employers' quality improvement activities on their use of the data. We conclude that a variety of factors, including trends, the health care purchasing environment, characteristics of firms, and problems with performance data and their presentation to users create barriers to incorporating this information into health care decisionmaking.