Patient Safety Climate (PSC) in Outpatient Surgery Centers

We examined perceptions of safety climate from health care professionals involved in the “Systems Engineering Intervention in Outpatient Surgery - a Collaborative Community Perspective” study currently underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Surveys were conducted in five outpatient surgery centers. The objectives of this study were to examine patient safety climate across various outpatient surgery centers and to address the relationship between patient safety climate and job categories, individual outpatient centers and the respondents' Quality of Working Life (QWL). Our results indicate that four safety climate scales (1) Top management commitment to patient safety, (2) General patent safety climate, (3) Employee commitment to patient safety, and (4) Change in patient safety can be created from the 12-item questionnaire and they may be a useful measure of an outpatient surgery center's patient safety climate. The four patient safety climate scales are also significantly associated with the outpatient surgery centers employees' QWL.