Safety Climate In Nursing

The theory of safety climate was originated on 1980, when Zohar was studying industrial organization. He define safety climate as "employees ' perceptions about the relative importance of safe conduct in their occupational behavior"(Zohar, 1980). So far, several other definitions of safety climate have been introduced. Such as: Objective measure of attitudes and perception toward heath and safety matters(Coyle et al., 1995).Workers ' perceptions and standpoints related to approach of risk management toward risk and safety (Salminen and Seppälä, 2005).

Understanding employees ' perceptions toward safety management is important in several ways. The theory of positive safety climate – safe behavior – accident prevention path is studied several

However, there are limited studies that have addressed safety climate among healthcare workers (Gershon et al., 2000; Hahn and Murphy, 2008; Smith et al., 2013). The question is that why ones should discriminate patient safety climate against safety climate of Healthcare Providers such as nurses. The reason is that there are powerful laws that support patient rights and continues supervision is implemented for that. On the other hand, patients are vulnerable individuals so any unsafe behavior has a potential of leading to serious consequences. In the other viewpoint, indeed patients are customer and healthcare managers attempt to obtain their customer satisfaction, because of business competition and/or financial

Researchers concluded that safety climate affected by work area as well as disciplines. Therefore, patient safety climate does not reflect the safety climate of Healthcare Providers or the whole organization, necessarily. However, we could not find a study that has investigated patient safety climate and staff safety climate simultaneously at the same healthcare organization.

Sometimes safety climate and safety culture are used interchangeably (Flin, 2007). It implies that safety climate is affected by organizational culture and in turn by national culture (Neal et al., 2000). A study on the multicultural nurses in Saudi Arabia revealed that safety climate was affected by national background significantly(Almutairi et al., 2013).

Healthcare providers are busy people so it is not practical to use time-consuming methods such as interview or Focus Group Discussion to investigate safety climate among them (Smith et al., 2013). Questionnaire is common most widely used tool for measuring safety climate. Several safety climate questionnaires have been developed. However, their usefulness depends on their psychometric quality and reproducibility (Olsen and Aase,