Healthcare professionals’ perspectives on working conditions, leadership, and safety climate: a cross-sectional study (January 2019)

Summary

Promoting patient and occupational safety are two key challenges for hospitals. 

Recent studies have shown there are key topics that are interrelated and form a critical foundation for promoting patient and occupational safety in hospitals. So far, these topics have mainly been studied independently from each other.

This study did a combined assessment of hospital staffs’ perceptions of four different topics:

• psychosocial working conditions
• leadership
• patient safety climate
• occupational safety climate.

Content

The WorkSafeMed study combined the assessment of the four topics psychosocial working conditions, leadership, patient safety climate, and occupational safety climate in hospitals. Looking at the four topics provides an overview of where improvements in hospitals may be needed for nurses and physicians. Based on these results, improvements in working conditions, patient safety climate, and occupational safety climate are required for health care professionals in German university hospitals – especially for nurses.