Can Incident Report Learning Predict Incident Reporting Attitude and Satisfaction Among Nursing Home Staff?

Saturday, 29 July 2017

Shu-Yuan Lin, PhD, RN
College of Nursing/Department of Nursing, Kaohsiung Medical University/Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Purpose:

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the prediction of incident reporting learning to incident reporting attitude and incident reporting satisfaction among nursing staff and administrators in nursing homes.

Methods:

This study was a cross-sectional survey conducted in nursing homes located in south Taiwan. Questionnaires were distributed to 146 full-time working nurses, nursing assistants and administrators, who had voluntarily participated and worked in 11 nursing homes. Data were collected by the scales of incident reporting attitude, incident reporting learning, and incident reporting satisfaction with 5-point Likert scale. Three scales of incident reporting attitude, incident reporting learning, and incident reporting satisfaction composed 9 questions, 25 questions and 10 questions in their order. All scales were newly developed for pursuing the study aim and tested for the content validity and reliability in this study. Content validity indexes of the scales of incident reporting attitude, incident reporting learning, and incident reporting satisfaction were 1.0, 0.96 and 0.92 separately. Coefficients of Cronbach’s alpha of the scales of incident reporting attitude, incident reporting learning, and incident reporting satisfaction were .93, .93, and .91 in their order. The SPSS 19.0 version software was used for statistical analysis, and descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, percentage, Pearson correlations and stepwise regression were adopted.

Results:

The mean age was 40.7 (±10.9) years old for all participants. The average year for current employment among participants was 5.2 (±5.1) years. Nurses accounted for 45.2%, nursing assistants accounted for 43.2% and administrators accounted for 11.6% of all participants. The mean score of incident reporting attitude was 35.6 (±4.9). Mean score for incident reporting learning was 98.2 (±11.0), and mean score for incident reporting satisfaction was 36.9 (±5.4). Pearson correlation results showed that moderate associations existed between incident reporting attitude, incident reporting learning, and incident reporting satisfaction (r=0.43-0.65). Results of stepwise regression showed incident reporting learning is the significant predictor for both incident reporting attitude and satisfaction. It explained 38.9% and 31.3% of total variance to incident reporting attitude and satisfaction.

Conclusion:

This preliminary study results could be a reference for championing incident reporting learning. Developing a continuing education program in nursing homes for nursing staff to enhance their motivations to learn from reporting incidents is strongly suggested. Furthermore, safety culture of nursing homes could transform from punishment to learn through improving peer learning from reporting incidents.