Safety culture refers to staff attitudes and values surrounding patient safety at every level of an organization.
A robust patient safety culture should promote and support patient safety and influence policies and behaviors surrounding care. Your hospital’s safety culture determines what behavior is expected and even rewarded. As a result, no team member fears retribution for communicating concerns. Furthermore, a strong hospital safety culture improves patient outcomes as well as staff satisfaction and well-being.
The AHRQ Culture of Safety Survey is a comprehensive tool designed to assess patient safety culture. It offers insights into the attitudes and perceptions that healthcare professionals hold toward patient safety.
Typical components and questions will be unique to each healthcare setting. According to the AHRQ, the areas assessed include:
Therefore, in health systems, understanding the underlying culture is crucial for identifying areas needing improvement. The safety culture survey serves as a web-based, user-friendly tool to gather this essential data. If you’re planning to implement one, check out our best practices for conducting a survey on patient safety culture.
Hospitals and healthcare organizations have much to gain from collecting, abstracting, and acting on culture survey data. The most actionable benefits and advantages include:
For more strategies on improving patient safety, consult our national patient safety goals guide.
Healthcare organizations frequently face challenges including survey fatigue and low participation rates. Many staff members may hold a belief that nothing will change as a result of their feedback. Often, this is based on negative past experiences, in which they felt their voices were not heard.
The first solution is to work with a vendor, such as ADN, to both administer the survey and analyze the data. The vendor will provide high-quality reports to make data visible. As a result, you’ll have a strong tool to guide your policy, allowing staff to see change in action.
Other techniques for increasing survey participation include:
United Regional chose to partner with American Data Network to conduct their SOPS Survey, as well as the additional Deep Dive Analytics Report and Senior Leadership Presentation.
Senior Director of Quality and Safety, Shelley Moser, DHA, RRT-NPS, CPHQ, had this to say about the experience of trusting American Data Network with their safety culture survey:
“Partnering with the ADN for our SOPS® allowed our team to focus on our greatest opportunities for improvement. The expertise of the ADN team is a great way to accelerate the process and empower us to act much sooner on the survey findings than if we had handled the process in-house. The analytics reports were thorough and easy to understand. We strive to have excellent processes and have high expectations at all levels of our leadership team. Our senior leadership was very complimentary of the reports and custom presentation that ADN delivered. We have used other vendors in the past, but this has been our most positive experience yet. We would love to work with ADN again.”
Shelley Moser, Senior Director of Quality and Safety
United Regional Health Care System
The AHRQ patient safety culture survey is an invaluable tool in the quest to improve patient safety. They are the premiere tool for assessing the attitudes and perceptions around safety within healthcare organizations. Ultimately, these surveys provide a roadmap for making meaningful policy improvements.
American Data Network recognizes the critical role of these surveys in enhancing patient safety. We encourage their use in all healthcare systems committed to providing high-quality care.
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