gms | German Medical Science

Background: Patient safety culture is being considered a source of health care professionals’ behaviour towards patient safety and thus a key driver of healthcare quality. However, while there is widespread agreement that patient safety culture is a complex multidimensional construct, so far little is known about the relationship between patient safety culture and patient-centredness. While some frameworks suggest that patient-centredness is related to patient safety culture, others do not.

Aim: The aim of our study is to explore the relationship between patient-centredness and patient safety culture.

Methods: Our study is part of the larger project “Development and evaluation of a complex interprofessional training program to improve patient safety”. Within this project we apply a multicentre cluster-randomized control trial design. To measure patient-centredness we translated the Provider-Patient Relationship Questionnaire (PPRQ) into German adhering to the principles of the ISPOR Task Force Report on Translation and Adaptation of Outcome Measures. The PPRQ includes 16 items in the following four dimensions: Effective Communication, Interest in the Patient’s Agenda, Empathy and Patient Involvement in Care. For assessing HCPs perception of relevant aspects of patient safety culture, we used validated items and scales from two common instruments: Organisational Learning and the single item outcome Overall Grade on Patient Safety from the German version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC-D), as well as the Teamwork Climate and Safety Climate from the Swiss short version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ). We calculated Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Values between .2 and .8 were considered appropriate to indicate sufficient correlation and to exclude possible multicollinearity.

Results: Our study sample consists of 328 members of interprofessional inpatient care teams (78 physicians, 220 nurses, 28 from other professional groups, e.g. physiotherapists, 2 demographic data missing) from 39 wards in the North, South and West of Germany. Preliminary results show that Patient-Centredness was significantly related with Overall Grade on Patient Safety (r = .274, p < .01). Furthermore, there were significant relationships between Patient-Centredness and Organisational Learning (r = .278, p < .01), Team Climate (r = .287, p < .01) and Safety Climate (r = .368, p < .01).

Discussion: First results suggest that patient-centredness is related with aspects of patient safety culture such as Organisational Learning, Teamwork Climate and Safety Climate. However, the relationships resulted in quite low Pearson’s r. With the aim of developing a model, further investigations will focus on the relationships between patient safety culture and the four dimensions of patient-centredness as well as control for sociodemographic aspects of participants, such as profession, gender and age and consider mediating effects of single dimensions.