title: Assessing patient safety culture of internal medicine house staff in an academic teaching hospital.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Patient safety culture (PSC) examines how individuals perceive an organization's commitment and proficiency in health and safety management. The primary objective of this study was to assess hospital PSC from the perspective of internal medicine house staff, and to compare the results by postgraduate year (PGY) of training and to national hospital benchmark data.
  
  
  METHODS
  The authors modified and used a version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC), which has 12 PSC dimensions. Each dimension uses a 5-level Likert scale of agreement ("Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree") or frequency ("Never" to "Always"). The survey was distributed to 68 PGY-2 and PGY-3 internal medicine house staff at an academic medical center between December 2006 and February 2007. Composite scores were created for each respondent by calculating the proportion of positive responses for each domain. Domain score means were compared between PGYs and to survey data from hospitals that administered the HSOPSC (ie, benchmark data).
  
  
  RESULTS
  The overall response rate was 85.3% (58/68). House staff scored lower on 6 and 4 of the 12 PSC dimensions, when compared with the overall national hospital and medicine unit benchmarks, respectively (P < .05). PGY-3 staff scored lower than PGY-2 staff in 2 dimensions (P < .05).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  PGY-2 and PGY-3 internal medicine house staff at our institution were in agreement on most of the PSC dimensions. Overall, house staff PSC was significantly lower than national hospital benchmark data for half of the dimensions. The results of this study will be used to establish internal PSC benchmarks and to identify targets for interventions to further improve PSC.
authors: Harish
authors: H
authors: Jasti
authors: Heena
authors: H
authors: Sheth
authors: Margaret
authors: M
authors: Verrico
authors: Subashan
authors: S
authors: Perera
authors: Gregory
authors: G
authors: Bump
authors: Deborah
authors: D
authors: Simak
authors: Raquel
authors: R
authors: Buranosky
authors: Steven M
authors: SM
authors: Handler