title: Establishing a culture of perinatal safety in a community hospital.
abstract: While unsafe behavior of frontline hospital staff, primarily physicians and nurses, is sometimes the proximal cause of adverse events, the critical importance of system-wide, hospital organizational factors is now being acknowledged(1,2). These organizational factors create the "safety culture" that influences the occurrence of these proximal failures.(3) The concept of safety culture originated in high-reliability organization theory, which was largely developed by a group of social scientists at the University of California at Berkeley who studied high-risk organizations that have achieved very low accident and error rates, for example, aircraft carrier flight decks, nuclear power plants and air-traffic control systems.(4-6) Safety culture refers to the enduring and shared beliefs and practices of organization members regarding the organization's willingness to detect and learn from errors.(7).
authors.forename: Jeffrey P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Phelan
authors.forename: Lisa M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Korst
mesh_terms: D006764:Hospitals, Community; D006801:Humans; D015279:Organizational Culture; D018743:Perinatal Care; D017751:Safety Management; D014481:United States