Assessing the Trends of Patient Safety Culture from Viewpoints of Physicians and Nurses Based on Safety Attitudes Questionnaire of a State- Owned Regional Hospital in Taiwan Hsin-Hung Wu Department of Business Administration, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan Email: hhwu@cc.ncue.edu.tw Jiunn-I Shieh Department of M-Commerce and Multimedia Applications, Asia University, Taichung City, Taiwan Email: jishieh@asia.edu.tw Wen-Huai Hsieh Superintendent Office, Chang Hua Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan Email: q0928705848@gmail.com Hsiu-Wen Hsueh Department of Industrial Education and Technology, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan Email: pk121@cc.ncue.edu.tw Kuan-Kai Huang Center for Quality Management, Chang Hua Hospital, Changhua County, Taiwan Email: hydokykk@gmail.com Abstract—Regularly assessing the perceptions of physicians and nurses in patient safety culture is critically important to enhance patient safety and reduce medical errors in healthcare organizations because physicians and nurses are the core staffs in healthcare organizations. This study uses six dimensions of safety attitudes questionnaire to examine whether or not physicians and nurses perceive differently in patient safety culture in 2016 and 2017. Mann-Whitney U test for two independent samples is used to compare if the perceptions of physicians and nurses in 2016 and 2017 are different statistically. The results show that physicians and nurses do not have different perceptions in safety climate, perceptions of management, and job satisfaction. Stress recognition has been improved from 2016 to 2017. On the contrary, teamwork climate and working conditions are getting worse from 2016 to 2017. Therefore, hospital management needs to pay much attention to improve teamwork climate and working conditions for physicians and nurses in order to improve patient safety and reduce medical errors in this state-owned regional hospital. Index Terms—patient safety culture, safety attitudes questionnaire, state-owned regional hospital, Mann- Whitney U test for two independent samples Manuscript received July 7, 2018; revised November 20, 2018. I. INTRODUCTION Soh et al. [1] pointed out that there is a growing trend for healthcare organizations to assess patient safety culture because safety culture can be viewed as a snapshot of an organization toward patient safety. A healthcare organization should develop a patient safety culture among its medical staffs and establish its structural interventions to enhance quality and safety for its patients [2]. Safety attitudes questionnaire (SAQ) developed by Sexton et al. [3] is one of the most frequent instruments to measure patient safety culture because SAQ has been linked to patient outcomes with good psychometric properties worldwide from medical staffs’ viewpoints [4]-[7]. Through assessing the patient safety culture by SAQ, the drawbacks of the provision of patient safety can be identified and healthcare organizations can learn from errors to provide better healthcare and improve patient safety relentlessly [4], [8]. Physicians and nurses are the core staffs in each healthcare organization because they contact patients directly and have direct influences on quality of care and patient safety [5], [9], [10]. Lee et al. [11] summarized that it is essentially important to track the performance of patient safety culture on a timely basis in order for 1 Journal of Advanced Management Science Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2019 ©2019 Journal of Advanced Management Science doi: 10.18178/joams.7.1.1-4