To adapt an instrument to measure patient safety culture, as rated by home care workers, and examine its psychometric properties.
A multicentre cross-sectional psychometric study.
We adapted the Nursing Home Survey SOPS to measure safety culture in home care. The questionnaire was translated to French following the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretest and Documentation (TRAPD) approach. Experts in home care evaluated the content validity of the adapted and translated instrument. To pre-test the questionnaire, we conducted cognitive interviews. We invited home care workers from two home care agencies in the French-speaking region of Switzerland to participate in the cross-sectional study from November to December 2024. We performed confirmatory factor analysis using the R package ‘lavaan’ and assessed convergent, discriminant and known-groups validity.
Eight experts assessed the content validity of the adapted and translated instrument. Responses from 672 home care workers were analysed. Except for compliance with procedures, all dimensions showed acceptable or good internal consistency. Regarding construct validity, first-order and second-order level confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable model fit. Safety culture correlated with overall patient safety rating and psychosocial safety climate. Regarding known-groups validity, participants who do not work directly with clients most of the time, and those willing to recommend the organisation rated the safety culture higher.
The psychometric evaluation indicated that the adapted instrument can be used as a valid and targeted tool to assess patient safety climate/culture in Swiss French-speaking home care agencies.
The existence of an adapted and validated instrument for use in home care enables managers to monitor safety culture and develop interventions to improve it and consequently ensure patient safety.
To the best of our knowledge, there was no instrument specifically targeting the measurement of patient safety culture in the home care setting. The adapted instrument for home care showed to be a valid tool to provide information about safety culture in this setting. The availability of an instrument to measure safety culture in the home care setting can promote its monitoring, raise awareness of safety culture among staff, help managers prioritise key aspects for culture change, and thus improve patient safety. A wider adoption of the same instrument could also facilitate comparative analyses.
We used the COSMIN guidelines for the psychometric evaluation of the instrument and the STROBE reporting guidelines for the cross-sectional study.
This study did not include patient or public involvement in its design, conduct or reporting.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary effectiveness of I-PASS-structured (Identification—Patient—Action—Situation—Synthesis) bedside nursing handovers on the handover global quality and the patients trust in nurses.
Oral end-of-shift nursing handovers can become moments of patient vulnerability. Moving handovers from nurses' offices to patients' bedsides is a means of improving them; however, implementing this remains a challenge.
This was a Type-1 effectiveness–implementation hybrid study.
We measured the effectiveness using a simple interrupted time series with three measurement points before and after the introduction of I-PASS-structured bedside nursing handovers between August and November 2022. Implementation was explored using multi-method measurements of quantitative and qualitative data. As an implementation strategy, we developed a specific training session, including simulations.
Bedside nursing handovers were introduced into one surgery and one medicine ward, with the 831 handovers evaluated showing significant improvements in handover quality compared to before implementation, although handover duration increased. Patient outcomes validated this change in nursing practice. However, examining nurses' perspectives of the implementation process revealed several obstacles to using bedside nursing handovers that training alone was not strong enough to overcome.
Given the findings of the present project, the use of bedside nursing handovers should be extended to other units by developing strategies that will make the practice sustainable.
Bedside nursing handovers improved handover quality and created a true partnership with the patient: nurses feel more confident about seeing the patient quickly. Patients felt more taken into consideration and safer.
For feasibility reasons, patients and the public were not involved in the design, conduct, reporting or dissemination plans of this research. The trial was prospectively registered before the first participant was recruited under the ISRCTN # 81701569.