How a Hospital's Organizational Climate Impacts Patient Safety

Patient safety is an important current issue, due to the negative repercussions that can occur when things go wrong in a medical setting. In their Third Annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Report (2006), HealthGrades estimated that 304,702 people died from medical errors between 2002-2004. Organizational climate has been shown capable of influencing many different outcomes, including some critical to patient safety. There is a dearth of research specifically studying how climate factors for nurses in particular relate to patient safety outcomes, and the current effort helps to close that research gap. This study examined how climate factors relate to the patient safety outcome of medication errors. Quarterly attitude data from nurses in eight hospitals were aggregated to the organizational level of analysis to represent organizational climate. Accurate archival figures were used to measure medication errors. The results speak to the importance of an organization being congruent in its communication and implementation of policies and procedures that affect one's daily working life.