An Importance-Performance Analysis of patient safety activities for inpatients in small and medium-sized hospitals

Purpose: This study aims to assess the importance and performance of patient safety activities for inpatients in small- and medium-sized hospitals. The objective is to identify the need for patient safety education by analyzing differences in importance and performance ratings.Methods: The study involved 300 patients hospitalized in three small- and medium-sized hospitals. Data collection took place in October 2023, focusing on investigating the importance and performance of patient safety activities. Descriptive statistics and an Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) were conducted using the IBM SPSS statistics 25.0 program.Results: The average importance of patient safety activities was 3.51±0.41, and the average performance was 3.37±0.43, indicating that the importance of patient safety activities was higher than their performance. According to the IPA, the components of patient safety activities that fell into the second quadrant of high importance but low performance included three medication-related items and one test/procedure/surgery-related item.Conclusion: In this study, it was found that inpatients in small- and medium-sized hospitals had a higher importance on patient safety activities than performance and needed ways to increase their performance. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a customized educational program that can increase the practical performance of inpatients’ patient safety activities based on the contents that were determined to need improvement.