Measurement of the workplace safety climate among hospital female nurses in Japan

Abstract

Aims Workplace safety climate has garnered attention as a factor encouraging organizational error management. We aimed to devise an instrument to measure this climate and examine the instrument s reliability and validity for hospital nurses. We also examined the association between this instrument and work environment, behavior, mental health, and nurses attributes.Methods The participants were hospital nurses in a public hospital in Japan. We conducted a sur vey involving a self administered questionnaire. The sur vey items were about the workplace safety climate and various other parameters of the work environment, behavior, and mental health.Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed for instrument validation internal consistency and item total I T correlation analyses were also performed. The factors relating to the workplace safety climate were examined by Spearman s rank correlation coefficients, one way ANOVA, and t test.Results The workplace safety climate scale was supported by a five factor structure. Confirmatory factor analysis of a partially revised model resulted in a 0.917 CFI and a 0.067 RMSEA, indicating a good fit. The workplace safety climate scale was negatively correlated with experiences of incidents not being reported and mental health. ConclusionThe workplace safety climate scale was shown to be a valid and reliable instrument.This study suggested that a healthy workplace safety climate may reduce deleterious behaviors and help improve mental health.

Development of a scale measuring home-visiting nurses’ attitudes toward patient safety: a cross-sectional study

“…The following was used as a measure of co-existing criterion-related validity with the permission of the creators: the tool that measures the workplace safety climate among hospital female nurses in Japan [ 18 ] (hereafter, the workplace safety climate measure) and the revised edition of the nurse’s ethical behavior scale [ 19 ] (hereafter, the revised ethical behavior scale). In home care, organizational learning is recognized as the most positive safety culture, and knowledge of safety culture can lead to systematic improvement and avoidance of patient safety accidents [ 20 ].…”

“…Therefore, the relationship between HVNs’ attitudes toward patient safety and their ethical behaviors was examined. The workplace safety climate measure was developed by Sakita and verified for reliability; the Cronbach’s alpha for the overall scale was 0.74 in the original study [ 18 ]. There are 20 items, and they are answered on a 5-point scale ranging from “1 = Strongly disagree” to “5 = Strongly agree”; the higher the score, the better the workplace safety organizational culture [ 18 ].…”

“…The workplace safety climate measure was developed by Sakita and verified for reliability; the Cronbach’s alpha for the overall scale was 0.74 in the original study [ 18 ]. There are 20 items, and they are answered on a 5-point scale ranging from “1 = Strongly disagree” to “5 = Strongly agree”; the higher the score, the better the workplace safety organizational culture [ 18 ]. The revised ethical behavior scale was developed by Ode and verified for reliability; Cronbach’s alpha was 0.78 for “risk avoidance” (5 items), 0.75 for “good care” (5 items), 0.74 for “fair care” (5 items), and 0.84 for the total scale [ 19 ].…”

“…To examine criterion-related validity, the relationship between the developed scale and the workplace safety climate measure [ 18 ] and the revised ethical behavior scale [ 19 ] was examined using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. No normality was found in the HVNs’ attitude toward patient safety scale and the revised ethical behavior scale; the Shapiro-Wilk normality test was performed for each.…”