Exploring Nursing Students' Perceptions of Patient Safety Culture in China

Patient safety is related to the quality of care. As nursing students are in the process of learning how to become healthcare professionals, their attitudes toward patient safety are critical to ensuring that patients receive safe and high-quality care. This study aims to provide a strong reference for the development of patient safety education and to help enhance the nursing students' attention to patient safety, thereby contributing to providing safer and more reliable nursing care for patients. To explore in depth the status of nursing students' attitudes towards patient safety and to analyze the factors affecting their attitudes, a rigorous methodology is adopted. The Chinese version of the Safety Attitude Questionnaire (C-SAQ) is used to survey a cohort of 263 nursing students from a medical school in Sichuan, and the collected data is statistically analyzed using SPSS 26.0 software. The total mean score of patient safety attitudes among nursing students was 66.93±14.27. The mean scores for the six dimensions of patient safety attitudes, ranked in descending order, are as follows: perception of management, working conditions, safety climate, job satisfaction, teamwork climate, and stress recognition. The results of univariate analysis analyses show that nursing students whether they have or have not received patient safety education and those who have not experienced nursing errors during their internship, demonstrate more positive patient safety attitudes (p-value < 0.05). Patient safety attitudes among nursing students are at a lower to middle level. Each internship teaching hospital should effectively incorporate patient safety education into the entirety of clinical nursing practice education, increase the number of safety education courses for internship nursing students during their internships, and focus on internship nursing students who have experienced nursing errors so that they can further improve the positivity of internship nursing students' attitudes towards patient safety.