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. 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.