Factors Affecting Patient Safety Programme in Government Hospitals of Sri Lanka

The objective of this study is to assess the factors that affect the patient safety programme in government hospitals of Sri Lanka. Method: A hospital based cross sectional descriptive study was conducted at the selected line ministry hospitals as they have established Quality Management Units. The study population was the administrative and clinical staff at these hospitals who had been employed at the hospital for at least 6 months and they should be working on a permanent basis. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the data collection. It contains two parts. First part deals with the perception on patient safety programme. It consists patient safety programme as dependent variable and five independent variables (organizational safety culture, leadership, communication, team structure and work environment) with 45 questions. The second part comprised six questions on socio-economic characteristics. Results: 327 members participated in his study. Out of that, 242(74%) were female, 74(22.6%) were male and 11(3.4%) didn’t mention the gender. Leadership has the highest mean value of independent variables and work environment has the second highest mean. Patient safety programme shows highest correlation with team structure (0.255), and lowest with work environment (0.200). Organizational safety culture has the correlation of 0.253 with patient safety programme which is an important factor next to team structure. Communication has the correlation of 0.231 and leadership has the value of 0.221, and both have significant correlation with patient safety programme. Conclusion: All assessed independent variables such as team structure, organizational safety culture, leadership, communication and work environment significantly affect the patient safety programme. Team structure and organizational safety culture have the highest correlation with patient safety programme.