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Evaluating the culture of safety

The London Deanery, University of London, 33 Millman Street, London WC1N 3EJ, UK; jfirth-cozens@londondeanery.ac.uk

Keywords: patient safety; culture of safety; leadership; change management

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Where once poor patient safety was deemed to be the result of individuals and technical inadequacy, ways of improving safety increasingly focus on the interaction of technology, human resources and organisations, together with the value systems or culture which lie behind them.¹ In this issue of QSHC Pronovost et al² describe the development of a scale from a tool which looked at cockpit management attitudes, with questions focusing very much on the leader’s role in the enhancement of a safety culture. They found that staff saw their supervisors as having a greater commitment to safety than the more senior leaders.

Their emphasis on views of leadership—including management—is important. Leadership style in terms of personality and attitudes can have real consequences for safety^3,4 and for accurate reporting of error.⁵ It is not just personality or style that matters, however; the larger the gap between management’s view of risks . . . [Full text of this article]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				L. Stevenson, C. McRae, and W. Mughal Moving to a culture of safety in community home health care J Health Serv Res Policy, January 1, 2008; 13(suppl_1): 20 - 24. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]