Safety Culture in Neonatal Intensive Care Units in the Gaza Strip, Palestine: A Need for Policy Change

- Assessing safety culture in NICU is important to identify areas for improvement and designing patient safety programs.
- Scores reported by our participants were low and were below the cut-off point for a positive score.
- Results showed low reporting pattern of adverse events which could be related to prevalence of punitive culture.
- Physicians reported events more frequently than nurses.
- Variations in safety culture in NICUs serve as a stimulus to tailor specialized programs to address the needs of each NICU.

IntroductionAssessment of the prevailing safety culture within the Gazan health care system can be used to identify problem areas. Specifically, the need for improvements, raising awareness about patient safety, the identification and evaluation of existing safety programs and interventions for improving the safety culture. This study aims to assess the safety culture in the neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in Gaza Strip hospitals and to assess the safety culture in regards to caregivers' characteristics.MethodsIn a cross-sectional study using a census sample, we surveyed all nurses and physicians working in at all the NICUs in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) which includes six scales was used to assess participants' attitudes towards safety culture.ResultsThe overall score for SAQ was 63.9. Domains' scores ranged between 55.5 (perception of management) and 71.8 (stress recognition). The scores reported by our participants fell below the 75 out of a possible score of 100, which was considered as a cut-off point for a positive score. Moreover, our results revealed substantial variation in safety culture domain scores among participating NICUs.ConclusionThese results should be an indicator to our health care policy makers to modify current or adopt new health care policies to improve safety culture. It should also be a call to design customized programs for improving the safety culture in NICUs in the Gaza Strip.