Does Employee Safety Matter For Patients Too? Employee Safety Climate And Patient Safety Culture In Health Care

Objective: We examined relationships between employee safety climate and patient safety culture. Because employee safety may be a precondition for the development of patient safety, we hypothesized that employee safety culture would be strongly and positively related to patient safety culture.Methods: An employee safety climate survey was administered in 2010 and assessed employees' views and experiences of safety for employees. The patient safety survey administered in 2011 assessed the safety culture for patients. We performed Pearson correlations and multiple regression analysis to examine the relationships between a composite measure of employee safety with subdimensions of patient safety culture. The regression models controlled for size, geographic characteristics, and teaching affiliation. Analyses were conducted at the group level using data from 132 medical centers.Results: Higher employee safety climate composite scores were positively associated with all 9 patient safety culture measures examined. Standardized multivariate regression coefficients ranged from 0.44 to 0.64.Conclusions: Medical facilities where staff have more positive perceptions of health care workplace safety climate tended to have more positive assessments of patient safety culture. This suggests that patient safety culture and employee safety climate could be mutually reinforcing, such that investments and improvements in one domain positively impacts the other. Further research is needed to better understand the nexus between health care employee and patient safety to generalize and act upon findings.