Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims:The attitude of hospital workers toward safety culture in working domain has a direct effect on safe quality of care services to patients. Therefore, the purpose of this survey was studying the safety attitudes of the nurses of CCU in the educational and non-educational hospitals of Ahvaz and comparing them to each other.

 Methods:The cross-sectional study was performed for 75 volunteer nurses of CCU. The data was collected through a modified Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) relating to the CCU wards. Reliability and validity of the questionnaire obtained from other studies. The data on six safety dimensions include teamwork climate, job satisfaction perception of management, safety climate, working condition, and stress recognition were scaled and scored for positive and negative questions separately using a 5-point Likert scale. Statistical analyses of the means were conducted using SPSS 16 Anova and pearson correlation at a significance level of P< 0.05.

Results:the results showed that the scores average of safety attitude in the 6 parts, i.e., teamwork climate, job satisfaction, perception of management, safety climate, working condition, and stress recognition was 68.37, 55.26, 52.11, 48.46, 57.04 , and 57.09 for the nurses of the educational hospitals, and 75.41, 65.14, 59.59, 54.32,57.63, and 68.73, for the nurses of the non-educational hospitals, respectively. The results also showed the significant difference in teamwork climate between the two kinds of hospitals (sig=0.026). In addition, an interstitial difference was recognized in the management understanding of the two kinds of hospitals (sig=0.059). In recognition of stress, difference between the two types of hospitals was also completely significant (sig= 0.0001).                                                                                                     

Conclusion:Managing and trying to increase mutual understanding, and also paying attention and planning to improve effective factors of nurses' job satisfaction, especially for the female nurses in educational hospitals, can be very effective in their safety attitude and safety culture improvement in working climate.