Managing issues related to safety culture to enhance medication safety in health care settings
Medication safety as an outcome of well-organized medication management relies heavily on a strong safety culture. Creating a safety culture involves building alignment between individual, group, and institutional values related to safety, which affect clinicians’ attitudes, perceptions, and—generally—behavior patterns. To enhance medication safety culture, it is imperative to improve safety tools and safety climate. Safety climate is a unit-level construct and represents individuals’ collective perception of safety priorities and practices in their organization.
The overall purpose of this project was to promote managing safety culture in relation to medication safety in health care settings. This project is divided into two parts based on its methodology. Both parts focus on factors associated with safety climate as the primary component of safety culture. Part 1 comprised the practical side of the study and involved gathering primary data. Its overall aim was to describe the process of developing medication safety culture, with an emphasis on medication management in hospital emergency departments (EDs), by using participatory action research.
The data we collected and analyzed data in Part 1 resulted in three original papers. The first paper shows the extent to which participatory action research assists in developing medication safety behaviors among emergency medicine staff. The second reveals the effects of engaging in participatory action research to improve emergency medicine clinicians’ attitudes to change in safety of medication management. The third provides a comprehensive model of medication error (ME) reporting that shows the factors that impede and facilitate this reporting as a medication safety behavior among health care professionals.
In Part 2 of the study, we gathered secondary data. The topics of the review papers were inspired by the results of the practical data and align with these results. Part 2 focuses on two other important elements of medication safety culture. The fourth paper advances our understanding of factors that contribute to improving guideline adherence among health care professionals to control the incidence of MEs. The fifth and final paper addresses the role of health care professionals’ emotional condition on building medication safety culture.
To conclude, health care leaders’ efforts to enhance medication safety culture, such as improving safety behaviors, attitudes, and emotional condition in relation to medication management, necessitates realistic and useful action plans, and the implementation of those plans relies on manager and staff effort. The ability to commence and sustain improvement initiatives in an organization’s safety culture is directly affected by workforce safety climate.