Assessment of patient safety culture in Pakistani Hospitals: A Baseline study for development of patient safety framework

Objective: To highlight requirement of assessing patient safety culture and patient safety framework for Hospitals in Pakistan. Methodology: The AHRQ's patient safety assessment tool was used to conduct survey in hospitals. This study was conducted in two hospitals of Riphah International University of 400 and 150 beds, respectively and total number of respondents included 152 hospital staff. The data were collected from clinical, paramedical and administrative staff; the response rate was 63%. Results: The patient safety culture in the hospitals was assessed as positive by 63% of healthcare providers. The highest positive score was achieved as organizational learning - continuous improvement 76.40% and the lowest positive score 28.83% observed in frequency of event reporting. Similarly, the other core areas like handoffs during transition of care (29.68%), communication openness (32.50%), teamwork across units (41.22%), feedback & communication (47.23%), management support for patient safety (50.00%), staffing concerns (53.25%) and managers actions for promoting patient safety (59.85%) observed as low positive responses. Conclusion: The survey highlighted strong and weak areas about patient safety awareness that can be helpful for the hospital's management to develop an effective patient safety framework as per requirement of their hospitals. Most of the barriers of implementation of patient safety culture in hospitals can be tackled through training of staff and ensuring proper communication among the staff and departmental heads because failure in communication has been found by Joint Commission as the leading cause of patient harm in hospitals.