title: The H-PEPSS: an instrument to measure health professionals' perceptions of patient safety competence at entry into practice.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Enhancing competency in patient safety at entry to practice requires introduction and integration of patient safety into health professional education. As efforts to include patient safety in health professional education increase, it is important to capture new health professionals' perspectives of their own patient safety competence at entry to practice. Existing instruments to measure patient safety knowledge, skills and attitudes have been developed largely to examine the impact of specific patient safety curricular initiatives and the psychometric analyses of the instruments used thus far have been exploratory in nature.
  
  
  METHODS
  Confirmatory factor analytic approaches are used to extensively test the Health Professional Education in Patient Safety Survey (H-PEPSS), a newly designed survey rooted in a patient safety competency framework and designed to measure health professionals' self-reported patient safety competence around the time of entry to practice. The H-PEPSS focuses primarily on the socio-cultural aspects of patient safety including culture, teamwork, communication, managing risk and understanding human factors.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results support a parsimonious six-factor measurement model of health professionals' perceptions of patient safety competency. These results support the validity of a reduced version of the H-PEPSS and suggest it can be appropriately used at or near training completion with a variety of health professional groups.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Given increased demands for patient safety competency among health professionals at entry to practice and slow, but emerging changes in health professional education, ongoing research to understand the extent of patient safety competency among health professionals around the time of entry to practice will be important.
authors.affiliation: School of Health Policy & Management, York University, Toronto, Canada. lgins@yorku.ca
authors.forename: Liane
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ginsburg
authors.forename: Evan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Castel
authors.forename: Deborah
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tregunno
authors.forename: Peter G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Norton
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006282:Health Personnel / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015279:Organizational Culture; D010348:Patient Care Team / Q000458:organization & administration; D061214:Patient Safety; D010465:Perception; D017064:Process Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D011361:Professional Competence; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D017751:Safety Management / Q000458:organization & administration