Uncorrected Proof Shiraz E-Med J. 2023 November; 24(11):e135573. Published online 2023 November 10. https://doi.org/10.5812/semj-135573. Research Article Attitudes of Healthcare Professionals and Internship Students Toward Patient Safety During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Qom, Iran, 2021 Masoumeh Akbari 1 , Seyed Ahmad Bathaei 1 , Iman Khahan Yazdi 2, * and Alireza Mirbagherigam 2 1 Department of Operating Room, School of Allied Medical Sciences,Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran 2 Student Research Committee, Qom University of Medical sciences, Qom, Iran * Corresponding author: Surgical Technology Student of Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran. Email: imankhahan@yahoo.com Received 2023 February 08; Revised 2023 October 08; Accepted 2023 October 17. Abstract Background: The main problems endangering patient safety are errors and accidents caused by healthcare providers, mainly due to their unfavorable patient safety attitudes. Objective: This research aims to investigate the attitudes of healthcare professionals and internship students toward patient safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted. Using the convenience sampling method, 232 healthcare professionals and students under training and internships were selected in intestinal care units, general wards, and operating room departments in 3 teaching hospitals affiliated with Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran. Data gathering was performed during August and September 2021, when the majority of visits to the hospitals were related to patients with COVID-19. The inclusion criteria included medical staff and students with at least six months of work experience in hospitals admitting COVID-19 patients. The exclusion criteria were unwillingness to participate, withdrawal from the study, and not completing the research. The Data collection tool was the Safety Attitude Questionnaire. Results: Most of the study participants were nurses (73.27%), women (55.60%), married (56.47%), and with lower incomes than expenses (50%). The mean safety attitude score of the participants was 99.07± 16.31. Average scores of safety attitude in groups of nurses, nursing internship, operating room nurses, and operating room internship were 98.69, 100.26, 108.16, and 96.40, respectively. Pearson correlation test showed no significant correlation between the safety attitude scores of healthcare professionals and their age (P = 0.652) and work experience (P = 0.441). Based on the Kruskal-Wallis test, the income status perception of the study participants was significantly correlated with their safety attitude scores (P = 0.001). Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic had not a significant effect on the attitude of healthcare professionals in comparison with previous studies. However, in this study, the attitudes of the healthcare professionals and interns were inappropriate. It is recommended that specialized training courses on how to deal with crises such as pandemics be planned and held for healthcare providers. Keywords: Safety Attitude, COVID-19, Healthcare Professionals, Internship Students 1. Background One of the most critical issues in providing safe medical services is patient safety (1). Patient safety can be described as the prevention and reduction of preventable risks and injuries when providing medical services (2). Preventing adverse events and increasing the quality of clinical services are essential measures that should be taken, considering the importance of patient safety (3). In addition, unsafe health care is one of the top ten causes of disability and death, causing approximately 64 million disabilities worldwide yearly. Studies in US hospitals have shown that harm reduction strategies can decrease total healthcare costs by up to $108 million (4). According to recent studies, several factors influence the attitude toward patient safety (5). Niknejad et al. found that one of the significant issues endangering patient safety is errors and accidents caused by healthcare providers, which are mainly due to their unfavorable attitudes toward patient safety (6). El Shafei and Zayed showed that providing medical services in a stressful environment may increase errors and injuries (7). A study conducted by Denning et al. found that the safety attitudes of medical staff may be associated with psychological Copyright © 2023, Akbari et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.