The nurse manager's approach to incident reports in ensuring patient safety

Abstract

Aim: In ensuring patient safety, it is very important to know and analyze adverse events and to carry out necessary improvement studies. Nurse managers are the key factor in creating a safety culture in learning from adverse events in the organization. The study was conducted to determine the negative incident reporting attitudes and perceptions of barriers to incident reporting of nurse managers.

Material-Method: The sample of the descriptive study consisted of 119 executive nurses. Data were collected using the Descriptive Information Form, Incident Reporting Attitude Scale and Incident Reporting Barriers Scale. Descriptive methods, Mann Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis and Pearson correlation analysis were applied for data analysis.

Results: The mean score of the Incident Reporting Attitude Scale was 2.07 (±0.28) and the mean score of the Incident Reporting Barriers Scale was 2.33 (±0.64). In the study, there was a statistically significant difference between the total score of the Incident Reporting Attitude Scale and gender, duration of professional experience, receiving training on incident reporting and witnessing an incident that should be reported in the last year (p<0.05). There is a statistically significant difference between the total score of the Incident Reporting Barriers Scale and the age groups and the status of receiving training on incident reporting. A moderate positive significant relationship was found between the incident reporting attitude scale and the incident reporting barriers scale (r=0,664; p<0,001).

Conclusion: It was found that incident reporting attitudes and barrier perceptions of nurse managers were partially negative and incident reporting attitudes affected reporting. It is recommended that nurse managers, who have a key role in ensuring patient safety, should show positive attitudes towards negative events and create the belief that a safety culture can be achieved in the institution by reporting incidents.