Press Ganey: State of Healthcare Safety 2026 (12 March 2026)

Summary

This report from Press Ganey draws on data from 1.3 million employees, 23.5 million patients, and 7.1 million safety events to examine where safety performance is strengthening, where it remains fragile, and what leadership actions will accelerate progress. It uses national safety culture data, workforce engagement metrics, patient safety event reporting patterns, safety outcomes, and patient experience insights.

Content

Key insights in this report include:

• Safety culture is a leading indicator of workforce stability. Seven of the top 10 national key drivers of employee engagement are related to safety culture, placing it among the strongest engagement drivers in the industry.
• Active reporting means higher performance. Facilities that report safety events at or above the expected rate in the Press Ganey High Reliability Platform™ are more than 8x as likely to rank in the top quartile for employee–manager collaboration, learning from mistakes, teamwork within units, and perception of care quality.
• Strong learning systems and reporting cultures reinforce one another. Organisations that excel in cause analysis rigor and action plan strength are more likely to sustain robust reporting environments, creating a virtuous cycle of visibility, accountability, and progress.
• Social capital is the connective tissue that brings everything together. Social capital is the force multiplier behind safety performance. Organisations that lead on employees’ responses to questions about respect and teamwork are 3x more likely to achieve top-quartile patient loyalty scores and 50–80% more likely to excel on key safety outcomes.
• Safety suffers when a single organisation operates as three hospitals under one roof. Many organisations struggle with consistency of experience depending on shift resulting in what seems to employees and patients like three hospitals under the same roof. Staff perceive safety culture differently and patient experience of care varies based on shift—day, night, or weekend. This variance between days vs. nights and weekends can lead to more safety events and patients feeling less safe.
• Learnings come from the Patient Safety Organization (PSO). Learnings from the Press Ganey PSO can be leveraged to understand how and when harm occurs across the industry based on trending data. The members of the PSO gather insights from the more than 190 health system partners and 7.1 million patient safety event records in its national database.