Patient Safety Perception among Community Pharmacists in Babylon Governorate

Background: One of the first points of contact between a patient and a health care system is the community pharmacist, so it is affordable to examine patient safety cultures in different environments by highlighting pharmacist understanding and helping to identify weaknesses in order to improve them. Materials and Methods: The study is described as a cross-sectional study that was performed using a self-administered questionnaire based on (Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture or PSOPSC) that was adapted in 2012 by The AHRQ (The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), the study was performed from October 2022 till January 2023, applied on community pharmacists from Babylon city center, districts, and subdistricts. A total of 200 responses were collected. The questionnaire was translated to Arabic for easy understanding of the questions, and the positive response rate (PRR) was calculated using a Likert five-point response scale of agreement. Responses were evaluated between “strongly disagree” with a 1-point score and “strongly agree” with a 5-point score. The “positive response” was calculated by addition of the total number of the two highest scores (4 and 5 points), whereas the term “other response” referred to the scores (1, 2, and 3 points); altogether, PRR was also compared to detect the effect of pharmacy location and years of pharmacists experience in their jobs. Results: Dimensions of “Patient counseling” had scored the highest PRR (86.4%), followed by the “Teamwork” and “Physical space and environment” domains which scored 86.2% and 79.5%, respectively. An overall PRR of 65.8% was scored for all items. Conclusion: 44% of the respondents evaluated the overall patient safety rating in their pharmacies as “very good,” about 41% evaluated it as “good,” and only 0.5% chose “poor.”