The Article in Brief
Impact of Individual and Team Features on Patient Safety Climate: A Survey in Family Practices
Barbara Hoffmann , and colleagues
Background This analysis of more than 2,100 questionnaires evaluates the impact of different individual and practice features on perceptions of the safety climate--shared employee perceptions of the priority of safety at an organization--in German primary care practices.
What This Study Found Though the family practice safety culture is positive overall, health care professionals' use of incident reporting and a systems approach to errors is fairly rare. The safety climate as perceived by doctors and health care assistants is not significantly influenced by individual and practice team characteristics. Participation of the whole practice team in the survey has a positive influence on safety climate, and doctors have more positive perceptions of 4 of the 7 climate factors evaluated than health care assistants.
Implications
- The authors call for German primary care doctors and health care assistants to learn more about the causes of errors and adopt a systems approach to patient safety incidents in order to learn from past errors.