Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Patient safety is one of the basic principles of health care and its evaluation and promotion are one of the main goals of the health system development plan in Iran. Therefore, the present study was designed to determine the status of patient safety culture in nursing staff of three hospitals, A and B, Shahrekord and C Borojen hospitals. This was a descriptive-analytical study performed from September to February 2018 and 359 eligible nurses were evaluated based on a multi-stage sampling method based on Patient Safety Culture Questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS 20 software. The mean age of participants was 23.33 ± 7.79 years. The overall score of patient safety culture was 123.23 ± 16.15 for nurses, with the lowest score being 8.40 ± 1.86 for communication channels as well as feedback and informing others about errors 8.72±2.23 reported. Also, there was no statistically significant difference between different dimensions of patient safety culture and overall score in three hospitals (p> 0.05). Leadership is a key element in prioritizing patient safety. How to respond to mistakes determines the hospital safety culture. To promote a good hospital safety culture, the fear of being blamed for mistakes must be eliminated and the atmosphere of open communication and continuous learning must be implemented in the hospital.

Ethical climate is an important part of organizational culture which affects all aspects of individual characteristics and its improvement in health care centers causes better response of nurses to moral stress and ultimately promotes the quality of medical services. The aim of this study was to determine the nurses' perception of the ethical climate governing in clinical environment in the teaching hospitals of Shahrekord University of Medical Sciences in 2018. This study was a descriptive-correlational study performed on 300 nurses by purposive sampling method. Two questionnaires used for data collection included demographic information and Olson ethical climate questionnaire. Data analysis was performed using linear regression and mean (SD) tests and by SPSS version 20. The results of the study showed that the overall score of moral climate in the participants was 3.79 ± 0.67. The highest and lowest ethical climate scores in this study were related to the dimension of nursing managers (3.86± 0.74) and physicians (3.58 ± 0.79), respectively. Also, a significant relationship was observed between variables such as years of experience and age with the dimensions of the ethical climate (p<0.05). According to the score of ethical climate obtained in this study, which is less than some studies conducted in this field in Iran. Considering the importance of the ethical climate and the consequences of defects in this issue, it is necessary for hospital managers to make appropriate plans to set up a favorable ethical climate on clinical environment in their most important priorities.