Abstract

Background: Health care is one of the most complex and high-risk industries in terms of patient safety. Nurse Anesthetist (NA) regard patient safety as it is primary concern identified as a significant healthcare challenge. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) was developed in 2006 with the aim to capture the safety climate in hospital settings. It has since been used in Operating Room (OR) to explore health care staff’s attitudes to different aspects of safety climate. No previous studies are known to exclusively explore NA’s attitudes towards safety in the OR. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate NA’s attitudes towards factors influencing patient safety in anesthesia care using the Swedish version of the short form of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire – operating room version (SAQ-OR).

Methods: An electronic web-survey was conducted between May and October 2022. Data was collected via SAQ-OR. The questionnaire consists of 30 items assessing safety climate in six dimensions: Teamwork Climate, Job Satisfaction, Perceptions of Management, Safety Climate, Working Conditions and Stress Recognition. 91 NAs participated in the study.

Results: A high awareness of importance for safety with positive scores for all domains but Perceptions of Management were found. Climate domain correlated the strongest with the total score of the SAQ-OR at (rho= 0.909). Internal consistency was found to concur with earlier studies using the SAQ-OR.

Conclusion: The NAs perceived that the majority of domains were of importance for the safety climate, except for Perceptions of Management. The lowest Cronbach’s alpha index was found for Stress Recognition and Perceptions of Management, which may be explained by the construction of these domains with only four items respectively.

Keywords: Patient safety, registered nurses, SAQ-OR, cross-sectional design, electronic email survey