Abstract
Objectives: Safety culture refers to the summary of perceptions that employees share about the safety of their work environment. We sought to identify the most frequent errors occurring in critical care area and the related contributing factors perceived by critical care nurses.
Methods: A questionnaire was filled anonymously by a convenience sample of 220 critical care nurses. The first five questions aimed to explore the hospital’s risk management organizational structure. The following seven questions investigated the nurses’ perceived causes of adverse events/near misses
Results: The mean number of reported errors is 3.5±1.6. The most frequent reported categories of errors are: the drug related errors (n=269, 34%), errors in the management of medical equipment (n=190, 24%) and procedural errors (n=123, 16%). The most frequent perceived causes with a great” impact on adverse events/near misses were: 1) communication’s problems (n=62, 28.2%), 2) lack of structures (n=54, 24.5%) and 3) problems of “leadership” (n=49, 22.3%).
Conclusions: A planned strategy of improvement needs to be created to clarify problems, undertake improvement actions and strategies that will help the team to work safely.