Hospital Administrative Staff vs. Nursing Staff Responses to the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture

Excerpt

The West Virginia Patient Safety Project is an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) funded, voluntary network of hospitals working to report, analyze, and learn from medical errors. As part of this project, we assessed the safety culture in 29 West Virginia rural hospitals using the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture in two measurement periods. We computed scores for each item and dimension on the survey for each hospital and generated reports to share with hospitals as a basis for interventions to improve their safety cultures. In general, nurses rated safety culture less positively than administrative staff in all hospitals, independent of duration of employment, hours worked, or work unit. Most differences were still evident after remeasurement, and in some cases they had increased. The continuing discrepancy in positive responses between administrative and nursing staff in several survey dimensions may be indicative of the need for more intensive interventions in certain areas of safety culture.