Patient safety culture in maternity units: a review

Linking Patient Safety Climate With Missed Nursing Care in Labor and Delivery Units: Findings From the LaborRNs Survey

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to explore the association of nurses' perceptions of patient safety climate with missed nursing care in labor and delivery (L&D) units.

METHODS

We recruited nurse respondents via email distribution of an electronic survey between February 2018 and July 2019. Hospitals with L&D units were recruited from states with projected availability of 2018 state inpatient data in the United States. Measures included the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire Safety Climate Subscale and the Perinatal Missed Care Survey. We estimated the relationship between safety climate and missed care using Kruskal-Wallis tests and mixed-effects linear regression.

RESULTS

The analytic sample included 3429 L&D registered nurses from 253 hospitals (response rate, 35%). A majority of respondents (65.7%) reported a perception of good safety climate in their units, with a mean score of 4.12 (±0.73) out of 5. The mean number of aspects of care occasionally, frequently, or always missed on respondents' units was 11.04 (±6.99) out of 25. χ2 Tests showed that six mostly commonly missed aspects of care (e.g., timely documentation) and three reasons for missed care (communications, material resources, and labor resources) were associated with safety climate groups ( P < 0.001). The adjusted mixed-effects model identified a significant association between better nurse-perceived safety climate and less missed care ( β = -2.65; 95% confidence interval, -2.97 to -2.34; P < 0.001) after controlling for years of experience and highest nursing education.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that improving safety climate-for example, through better teamwork and communication-may improve nursing care quality during labor and birth through decreasing missed nursing care. Conversely, it is also possible that strategies to reduce missed care-such as staffing improvements-may improve safety climate.

Patient safety culture in Oman: A national study

RATIONAL, AIM, AND OBJECTIVES

A positive patient safety culture in maternity units is linked to higher quality of care and better outcomes for mothers. However, safety culture varies across maternity units. Analyses of variation in safety culture using statistical process control (SPC) methods may help provider units to learn from each other's performance. This study aims to measure patient safety culture across maternity units in Oman using SPC methods.

METHODS

The 36-item Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) was distributed to all doctors, nurses, and midwifes working in ten maternity care units in Oman's hospitals and analysed using SPC methods. The SAQ considers six domains: job satisfaction, perception of management, safety climate, stress recognition, teamwork, and work condition.

RESULTS

Of the 892 targeted participants, 735 (82%) questionnaires were returned. The overall percentage of positive safety responses in all hospitals ranged from 53% to 66%, but no hospital had the targeted response of above 75%. Job satisfaction had the highest safety score (4.10) while stress recognition was the lowest (3.17). SPC charts showed that the overall percentage of positive responses in three maternity units (H1, H7, and H10) was above and one (H4) was below the control limits that represent special cause variation that merits further investigation.

CONCLUSION

Generally, the safety culture in maternity units in Oman is below target and suggests that considerable work is required to enhance safety culture. Several maternity units showed evidence of high/low special cause variation that may offer a useful starting point for understanding and enhancing safety culture.