The influence of patient safety culture on incident reporting among health care professionals working in public hospitals in Addis Ababa, Central Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Patient safety is crucial to the quality of patient care and remains challenging for countries at all levels of development. There is a popular acknowledgement of the importance of establishing patient safety culture in healthcare organizations. Hospitals with a positive patient safety culture are transparent and fair with staff when incidents occur, learn from mistakes, and rather than blaming individuals, look at what went wrong in the system. Health care providers are willing to report the errors but, due to poor reporting system and culture of blame and shame, there exists struggle of disclosure of adverse events. Objective: To investigate the influence of patient safety culture on incident reporting behavior among health care professionals in public hospitals in Addis Ababa, central Ethiopia. Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study was conducted from March 15-20, 2017 at public hospitals in Addis Ababa. A total of 697health professionals were selected by simple random sampling method. Self-administered questionnaire was distributed to collect the data. A multivariate linear regression model was fitted. Then the effect of the socio-demographic variables and patient safety culture dimensions on the dependent variable “incident reporting behavior” was assessed using multiple linear regression analysis. Results: Among the participants, 20.4% never reported an incident, 13.1% reported rarely, 19.9% reported sometimes. Only 30.4 % reported incidents al ways. Feedback about error (β=0.136, p=0.008), management support for safety (β=0.28, p< 0.001), Non-punitive response to error, Supervisor/manager expectation and actions promoting patient safety (β=0.356, p< 0.001) and communication openness (β=0.170, p< 0.001) were the most predictive dimensions of patient safety culture for the incident reporting. Conclusions: Incident reporting behavior among health care professionals was very low. To increase the incident reporting behavior, placing priority on improving event reporting feedback mechanisms, communication regarding systems and process, giving priority by top-level hospital leadership and non-punitive response to errors.