Patient Safety Culture in Tunisia: Defining Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Background: Although adverse events in health care have been a center of attention recently, patient safety culture in primary care is relatively neglected. This study aimed to provide a baseline assessment of patient safety culture in the primary healthcare centers and explore its associated factors. Methods: This is a multicenter cross-sectional descriptive study. It was conducted in the center of Tunisia over a period of 4 months. It surveyed 30 primary healthcare centers, thus 251 staff members. It used the French-validated version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture questionnaire. Results: The total number of respondents was 214 participants with a response rate of 85%. The dimension of “teamwork within units” had the highest score (71.47%). Though, three safety dimensions had very low scores, which are “frequency of event reporting,” “on-punitive response to errors,” and “staffing” with the following percentages 31.43, 35.36, and 38.43%, respectively. As for associated factors, the dimension of “Frequency of reported events” was significantly higher among professionals involved in risk management committees (p = 0.01). Conclusion: This study demonstrated that the level of the patient safety culture needs to be improved in primary healthcare centers in Tunisia. As well, the results obtained highlight the necessity of the implementation of quality management system in primary healthcare centers.