As part of its goal to support a culture of patient safety and quality improvement in the Nation's health care system, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is sponsoring the development of patient safety culture assessment tools for hospitals, nursing homes, and ambulatory outpatient medical offices.
Health care organizations can use these survey assessment tools to:
- Assess their patient safety culture.
- Track changes in patient safety over time.
- Evaluate the impact of patient safety interventions.
Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture—New
Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture
- Hospital Survey Toolkit—Select to download.
- 2008 Comparative Database Report—The 2008 report provides initial results from nearly 400 U.S. hospitals that can be used as benchmarks in establishing a culture of safety. The report consists of a narrative description of the findings and two appendixes, presenting data by hospital characteristics and respondent characteristics.
- 2007 Comparative Database Report—The 2007 report contains comparative results on 108,621 hospital staff respondents from 382 participating hospitals that administered the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. In the appendixes, the results are broken down by hospital characteristics (bed size, teaching status, ownership and control, region) and respondent characteristics (hospital work area/unit, staff position, interaction with patients).
Additional Surveys Under Development
Using the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture as a starting point, a new survey addressing patient safety culture in ambulatory outpatient medical office is under development. This new survey will contain new and revised items assessing dimensions that more accurately apply to each setting. The ambulatory medical office instrument will be pilot tested with providers and staff in 97 outpatient medical offices.
Download Information
The survey forms, User's Guide, and Feedback Report Template are available
in different formats. Your
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Hospital Survey Toolkit
Survey Forms
Survey User's Guide
Survey Feedback Report Template
Year 1 Comparative Database
Year 2 Comparative Database
Free Viewers
Files related can be accessed with free viewers if proprietary software is not available.
Current as of September 2008
Internet Citation:
Patient Safety Culture Surveys. September 2008. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/hospculture/