Patient safety and error reporting in obstetrics departments: Exploring nurses knowledge, attitude, and skills

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the patient safety attitudes, skills, knowledge and barriers related to reporting a medical error from a nursing perspective in obstetric departments. Martials and Methods: A cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted on a sample of 200 nurses and midwives. Patient safety attitudes, skills, and knowledge (PS-ASK) Scale was used to collect data from nurses. Results: Nurses had good knowledge and a positive attitude toward patient safety. However, the participants had higher scores in attitude than knowledge and skills. No significant difference was found between nurses and midwives regarding patient safety knowledge, attitude, and skills (p> 0.05). There are significant positive relationships between nurses' knowledge and a variety of safety attitude and skills (p < 0.05). The top three errors reported were: error during medication preparation and administration, failing to regularly monitoring of fetus's heart rate, and patient falls from beds or while walking without adequate supervision. Conclusion: Patient safety is considered one of the important areas in the health care industry. In the current study, the overall safety knowledge and skills could be described as good but not sufficient. This could be attributed to a lack of sufficient training and education. Reporting errors is still a problem due to fear of consequences.