Impact of Emergency Department and Intensive Care Nurses' Working Environments on Patient Safety Attitude

Aim: This study was conducted to determine the effect of emergency and intensive care unit nurses' working environments on their patient safety attitudes. Methods: The study is of descriptive type. The sample consisted of 71 nurses working in the emergency and intensive care units of a training and research hospital in a province in Turkey, who agreed to participate in the research. Data were collected with the "Nurse Introduction Form", "Work Environment Scale (WES)" and "The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) ". Descriptive statistics, t test, Mann Whitney U Test, Kruskall Wallis, Spearman correlation and multiple regression analyzes were used to analyze the data. Results: The average age of nurses is 31.89 (SD=7.13). More than 50% of the participants are women, they chose their profession willingly and are satisfied with the clinic they work in. The participants' average total score on the WES is 86.69 (SD=13.01) and the average total score on the SAQ is 145.55 (SD=21.71). A positive, moderate and statistically significant relationship was found between WES and SAQ (p<0.05). Conclusions: The research revealed that nurses' working environment and patient safety scales total and sub-dimension mean scores were at moderate levels and that the working environment positively affected patient safety attitudes. In institutionally improving nurses' patient safety attitudes, it is important to identify errors that affect patient life, evaluate error-reducing practices, and organize work environments. It would be beneficial to continue patient safety education programs.