Impact of individual and team features of patient safety climate: a survey in family practices

Abstract

Purpose: Knowledge about safety climate is fundamental to improving patient safety in health care organizations. Because individual and organizational factors influence the safety climate, we conducted a health care survey of German family practices so we could analyze the impact of the professional group, the professional experience of practice staff, and practice characteristics on perceptions of the safety climate.

Methods: We wrote to health care assistants and doctors in 1,800 randomly selected family practices in Germany and asked them to complete a newly developed and validated Frankfurt Patient Safety Climate Questionnaire. We conducted a descriptive analyses of items and climate factors, as well as regression analysis, to identify potential predictors of the safety climate in family practice.

Results: The response rate from the participating practices was 36.1%. Safety climate was perceived to be generally positive with the exception of the factors of error management and perception of the causes of errors. We discovered that whether or not the entire team had taken part in the survey had a positive influence on most factors. Doctors had more positive perceptions of 4 of 7 factors addressed to both professions. Male participants and doctors showed the most willingness to admit they had made an error.

Conclusions: Though the safety climate in German family practices was positive overall, health care professionals' use of incident reporting and a system's approach to errors was fairly rare. When evaluating the safety climate in primary health care practices, respondents' individual characteristics, as well as organizational features, should be taken into account.

Keywords: family practice; health care survey; patient safety; primary health care; safety climate.

Figure 1

Flow chart displaying numbers of addressed and participating practices and health care professionals. HCA=health care assistant.