Paper
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Caregiver and Home Health Issues
Perceptions of Patient Safety, Worker Safety and Risk Tolerance in Community Care
Waqar A. Mughal, BSc, MSc1, Leah Thomas-Olson, BKin1, Cora McRae, RN, BSN, MSN2, and Lynn Stevenson, PhD3. (1) Workplace Health, Fraser Health, Surrey, BC, Canada, (2) Professional Practice, Fraser Health, Surrey, BC, Canada, (3) Vancouver Island Health Authority, Victoria, BC, Canada
Learning Objective #1: Describe the relationship between worker safety and patient safety.
Learning Objective #2: Identify potential factors contributing to workers' perception of personal and patient safety.
Safety for both patient and worker are of concern to any healthcare organization, with the home care setting presenting with barriers not experienced in facility-based care. A large healthcare organization in British Columbia has undertaken efforts to reduce risk of injury to direct care providers in the community setting through the provision of patient-handling assistive devices. This paper will examine the relationship among perceptions of patient safety, worker safety and risk tolerance. Surveys were distributed in two phases to the same worker population representing two offices with combined staffing of 600 community healthcare workers providing home support services. Phase I involved the distribution of the Safety Climate Survey (IHI, 2004) in the spring of 2004. Phase II occurred in the fall of 2004, when a novel tool was developed using scaling similar to the Safety Climate Survey asking questions regarding the workers’ perceptions of the working culture and risk tolerance behaviours with respect to safe client handling practices. A total of 81 responses were collected in Phase I and 141 in Phase II. Pearson correlations coefficients were calculated across the three scores for four separate categories: “age”, “years of work experience in the occupation”, “years of work experience in the community setting”, and “years of work experience with the healthcare employer”. Strong correlations were observed between scores for Risk Tolerance and Worker Safety Culture in all three categories for work experience (r2>0.900; p<0.05), but not across the age categories (p=0.510). When “years of work experience in the occupation” was examined, Patient Safety scores were correlated to the other two, with significant correlations to Risk Tolerance (r2=0.750; p=0.052) and Worker Safety Culture (r2=0.769; p=0.043), indicating that workers’ perceptions of personal and patient safety are closely related to each other based on how long they’ve been working in their occupation.

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