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. Simple random sampling technique was used to select the study
participants. A total of 697health professionals were selected by simple random sampling
method Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture tool developed by Agency for Health Research
and Quality was used. Data were coded, entered into Epi Data 3.1, and exported to SPSS version
21.0 software for analysis. 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 691 health care providers, 578 health care providers returned the
questioners with response rate of 83.6%. Majority (63.4%) of the respondents were males while
the remaining 36.6% were female health care providers. The mean age of the participants was
29.06 (± 4.893years). In this study, 20.4% of the participants never reported an incident, 13.1%
reported rarely, 19.9% reported sometimes. Only 30.4 % of respondents reported incidents
always. 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 outcome assessing the
incident reporting.
Conclusions:
Incident reporting behavior among health care professionals was very low. To increase the
incident reporting behavior, this study suggests placing priority on improving event reporting
feedback mechanisms, communication regarding systems and process, giving priority by toplevel hospital leadership and non-punitive response to errors.
