Areas of Potential Improvement for Hospitals' Patient-Safety Culture in Western Ethiopia

Background: Patient-safety culture is an important component of health-care quality and currentlyan issue of high concern globally. In Ethiopia, little is known about patient-safety culture in hospitals. We assessed the patient-safety culture and associated factors among health-care workers in public hospitals of East Wollega Zone, western Ethiopia. Methods: This institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 421 health-care workers selected using simple random sampling from March 4 to March 29, 2019. A standardized measuring 12 patient safety-culture components was used for data collection. Data were cleaned and entered into EpiData version 3.1 and analysis done using SPSS version 25 (IBM). Bivariate and multivariate linear regression analyses were performed. Significance was set at 95% CI and p<0.05, and unstandardized beta-coefficients were used to measure extent of association. Results: This study revealed that the level of patient-safety culture was 49.2% and patient safety culture-component scores ranged from 29.2% for nonpunitive responses to error to 77.9% for teamwork within a hospital unit. Age >= 45 years (beta=13.642, CI: 5.324-21.959; p=0.001), 1-5 years' experience at the current hospital (beta=5.559, 95% CI 2.075-9.042; p=0.002), and working in general hospitals (beta=11.988, 95% CI 7.233-16.743; p<0.001) and primary hospitals (beta=6.408, 95% CI 2.192-10.624; p=0.003) were factors associated with better scores on patient-safety culture. Conclusion: Overall scores for patient-safety culture were low. Improving the current state of patient safety in public hospitals would require tailored interventions to address low-scoring components, such as nonpunitive responses to error.