2. Promoting safety culture

Evaluation of the safety culture

Improving the safety of care is a priority issue for the HUG. To this end, the hospitals regularly carry out surveys to assess the safety culture of their employees. To do this, they use questionnaires originally from the aviation field, which have been adapted to the field of healthcare. The questions address various topics:

  • overall perception of safety
  • frequency of reporting undesirable events
  • the continuous improvement approach
  • teamwork within the divisions/departments
  • inter-departmental collaboration.

According to the latest staff survey carried out at the end of 2016, safety culture at the HUG is on the rise in almost every respect. The best result was for teamwork within a department, division or unit with 73% positive responses, while teamwork between departments saw the worst results in the first survey with only 28.6% positive responses. The area seeing the most improvement is management support for the safety of care, which has gained 10% of positive responses. The worst score relates to the fear of punishment in the event of error, or the fear of being blamed. In light of this result, a training program will be implemented in 2018 concerning the management of mistakes by senior managers. The next survey is planned for 2018.

Percentage of positive responses for the 10 aspects of our healthcare safety culture & comparison of HUG results 2013/2016.

Average %
 20132016
Overall perception of the safety of care45.249.1
Reporting undesirable events59.664.3
Expectations and actions of superiors regarding the safety of care61.766.6
Learning organization and continuous improvement56.056.4
Teamwork in the department/unit72.773.2
Freedom of expression54.357.2
Non-punitive response to error29.333.6
Human resources31.135.8
Management support for the safety of care35.345.6
Teamwork between the different establishment divisions28.635.0

(In normal characters, the aspects that have seen improvement, in italic, the aspects with no significant statistical change.)

 

 

 

Last update : 29/01/2019