Actions by Full-Time Safety Managers to Foster Safety Culture using Incident Reports

Abstract

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (2007) named ‘fostering a safety culture' as one role of medical safety managers in its Work Guidelines for Medical Safety Managers and its Training Program Development Guidelines for Education.

We therefore conducted a study with the objective of elucidating the actions being taken by full-time safety managers to foster safety culture within organizations. Regarding the study methods, an incident report for which the full-time safety managers felt certain that he or she had been able to contribute to the fostering of a safety culture within his or her organization was selected, semi-structured interviews were administered to the full-time safety managers regarding the sequence of actions for fostering a safety culture from receiving the incident report to making an evaluation, and a qualitative, descriptive analysis was performed. Study participants were ten nurses who were full-time safety managers working in hospitals that have received Medical Safety Addition 1. We extracted six categories, 13 subcategories, and 28 codes. In order to foster safety culture within the organization after receiving the incident report, the full-time safety managers took the following six steps: decision-making concerning organization activities, assessment of safety in the relevant departments, plans for organization activities, steps towards organization activities, infusion of values towards new safety measures, and foster a new sense of values related to safety.

These findings suggest that full-time safety managers engage in fostering of a safety culture within organizations by utilizing measures as specialists in medical safety.