Project duration: 1.10.2022 - 30.09.2024

Project leader: dr. Nandu Goswami

Funder: ARIS (Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency)  

Research project of the Target Research Program "CRP 2022 in cooperation with Murska Sobota General Hospital

Starting points: Patient safety is a science and practice that has been neglected for too long in the world and in our country. The harm experienced by patients due to errors has reached epidemiological proportions, with studies showing that on average one in 10 patients treated in hospital experience harm to their health due to an error rather than the nature of their illness or complication, and around 0 .1% to 0.2% of them also die due to mistakes. 50% of adverse events are preventable. Worldwide, every 4 out of 10 patients can experience harm (80% of which could be prevented) in primary care. The estimate for Slovenia is about 35,000 adverse events and about 1,000 deaths per year in hospitals, about 50% of which could be prevented. Our approach to errors is outdated because it ignores the science of patient safety. A survey of the culture of safety in acute general hospitals showed a poor perception of the culture of safety among patients in ten acute general hospitals in our country in 2011, but the measurement of the culture of safety was never repeated. It has not yet been measured at other levels of healthcare, except for a small part of the targeted group of managers in primary healthcare. Healthcare patient safety culture surveys assess employee perceptions of procedures and behaviors in their work environment and indicate priorities for implementing safety. The benefit of patient safety culture surveys is in promoting a different way of thinking about safety and understanding the changes needed for improvement. The external environment that influences the poor perception of safety culture and the behavior of health professionals and staff is in the justice system and the practice of the courts, where human error is criminalized and culpable damages are used. The latter is often unsuccessful or extremely time-consuming and expensive and requires proof of individual guilt, although around 80% of preventable harmful events are systemic, i.e. due to unregulated systems.

Objective: To prepare instruments in the form of questionnaires for measuring safety culture at different levels of the healthcare system and to standardize them in pilot studies. We will evaluate the psychometric properties of the Slovenian translation of the questionnaire of the Agency for Health Research for (AHRQ) for 1) outpatient pharmacies, 2) the medical part of social welfare institutions, 3) the upgrade of the questionnaire for hospitals according to the development since 2011, 4) the use of the already translated and psychometrically tested of the Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) for primary care.