ABSTRACT
The measurement of patient safety culture is a key topic of interest to researchers in the field of patient safety. However, there is little agreement about how to define and assess patient safety culture and a range of different measurement tools has been developed. There does seem to be consensus, though, that dimensions of patient safety culture need to include management commitment, teamwork, communication and incident reporting. The Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC), designed for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ; Sorra and Nieva 2006), is especially popular and is now the recommended tool of choice for some reviewers (European Society for Quality in Healthcare 2010). The HSOPSC has been extensively used by different research teams across different countries (see Chapters 10 and 14) and includes 42 items measuring 10 dimensions of safety culture and four outcome dimensions, including two ‘single item outcomes’, namely ‘Patient Safety Grade’ and ‘Number of Events Reported’. Its implementation in practice is illustrated in Chapters 10, 11, 12 and 14.
