Patient Safety and Staff Well-Being: Organizational Culture as a Resource

Abstract

The present study examines the relationship between patient safety culture and health workers' well-being. Applying the conservation of resources mechanism, we tested theory-based hypotheses in a large cross-disciplinary sample (N = 3232) from a Taiwanese metropolitan healthcare system. Using the structural equation modeling technique, we found that patient safety culture was negatively related to staff burnout (β = -0.74) and could explain 55% of the total variance. We also found that patient safety culture was positively related to staff work-life balance (β = 0.44) and could explain 19% of the total variance. Furthermore, the above relationships were invariant across groups of diverse staff demography (gender, age, managerial position, and incident reporting) and job characteristics (job role, tenure, and patient contact). Our findings suggest that investing in patient safety culture can be viewed as building an organizational resource, which is beneficial for both improving the care quality and protecting staff well-being. More importantly, the benefits are the same for everyone in the healthcare services.

Keywords: conservation of resources; patient safety culture; staff burnout; work–life balance.