Patient safety climate in public hospitals in Northeastern Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Patient safety climate in public hospitals in Northeastern Brazil
Received 18th June 2020; Received in revised form 19th July 2020; Accepted 20th August 2020; Published online 29th September 2020
Copyright © 2020, Rafael Carvalho de Maria et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We conducted a cross-sectional, descriptive, and quantitative study to assess the patient safety climate from the perspective of nursing professionals from five public hospitals in the state of Maranhão, Brazil. We applied the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire to a sample of 390 participants. Data were processed using the Statistical Package for Social Science version 22.0 and examined by analytical statistics. We found that patient safety climate was below expectations in the studied hospitals. We also identified that professionals are exposed to fragile working conditions for quality. Moreover, using the instrument's domains, we identified areas that need to be strengthened. Therefore, we recommend that the state and institutional managers adopt strategies that end a model of healthcare that is prone to error. We also recommend that the nursing staff is more valued. These conditions are the minimum required to improve patient safety indexes, according to the reality of each institution.
