Nurses' perceptions about patient safety culture in public hospital in Vietnam

Aim: This paper is aimed to assess nurses' perceptions of patient safety culture in four public general hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam. Background: Patient safety culture is a vital component in ensuring high quality and safe patient care. Assessment of nurses' perceptions on existing hospital patient safety culture (PSC) is the first step to promote PSC. Methods: The cross-sectional study surveyed 705 nurses utilizing the validated Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) in an online format. Results: The average positive response rate was high at 72.8 % and varied from 52.9 % to 93.4 %. The strongest areas are teamwork within units (93.7 %) and supervisor/manager expectations and actions promoting patient safety (85.0 %). The areas for improvement are staffing (52.9 %) and non-punitive response to error (57.6 %). The communication openness, staffing, frequency of events reported, lengths of services in hospital and unit are significant factors that predict the overall patient safety grade. Conclusions: Initiatives are necessary to improve response to errors, staffing, and error reporting. Nurse managers could develop and implement interventions and program to improve patient safety, including providing education related to patient safety culture, encouraging staff to notify incidents and avoiding punitive responses.