No abstract

JFZ is a well-functioning and growing incident reporting system. Future efforts to improve the benefits of incident reporting will concentrate on increasing the utilisation of the system and broadening the spectrum of reported incidents.

PURPOSE Knowledge about safety climate is fundamental to improving patient safety in health care organizations. Because individual and organizational factors influence the safety climate, we conducted a health care survey of German family practices so we could analyze the impact of the professional group, the professional experience of practice staff, and practice characteristics on perceptions of the safety climate. METHODSWe wrote to health care assistants and doctors in 1,800 randomly selected family practices in Germany and asked them to complete a newly developed and validated Frankfurt Patient Safety Climate Questionnaire. We conducted a descriptive analyses of items and climate factors, as well as regression analysis, to identify potential predictors of the safety climate in family practice. RESULTSThe response rate from the participating practices was 36.1%. Safety climate was perceived to be generally positive with the exception of the factors of error management and perception of the causes of errors. We discovered that whether or not the entire team had taken part in the survey had a positive influence on most factors. Doctors had more positive perceptions of 4 of 7 factors addressed to both professions. Male participants and doctors showed the most willingness to admit they had made an error.

Three main strategies should be pursued to improve patient safety. A safety management system involving error reporting, learning from errors, and the fair exchange of information should be established in hospitals and in doctors' outpatient practices. An error management system should be implemented in which critical incidents are identified, reported, and analyzed so that similar events can be prevented, and measures for the prevention of critical incidents and errors should also be implemented and evaluated. Finally, whenever preventable adverse events do occur, the persons involved should take action to prevent further harm to the patient and other involved individuals.