Patient Safety Culture Essay

In the year 1999, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, bringing a serious concern regarding a lack of quality care in the healthcare setting to light; a startling statistic claimed that up to 98,000 hospital deaths occur yearly due to medical errors (Kohn, 1999). As humans, errors are sometimes unavoidable. Kohn (1999), however, discusses that by "designing systems that make it hard for people to do the wrong thing and easy for people to do the right thing" (p. ix) these errors can be minimized.
Since the publication of To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, healthcare organizations continue to strive to improve patient safety and quality of care. According to Tereanu et al. (2017), patient safety is “freedom for a patient from unnecessary harm or potential harm associated with healthcare.” Furthermore, patient safety culture refers to the product of individual and group norms, values, attitudes, perceptions and patterns that guide the behaviors of healthcare providers (Soo-Hoon, Phan, Dorman, Weaver, Pronovost & Lee, 2016). A positive safety culture

I found this to be interesting as most often tools like this are used solely for hospital staff who have direct contact with patients. As I thought more about this, I realized that patient safety is truly affected by more than just healthcare providers. For example, without housekeepers the rate of infection and other nosocomial diseases would most likely be a lot higher. Therefore, patients' health would be at risk. Similarly, security ensures patient safety by keeping the hospital clear of potential outside threats. In both cases, understanding the culture of patient safety for all staff members can be beneficial to providing holistic