Nurses' perceptions of teamwork climate in hospital: the impact on patient safety climate

Safety climate and teamwork are two variables that might be considered as satisfying factors and might affect retention levels as well as patients’ and nurses’ outcomes. Understanding such concepts will help in designing economic interventions to retain more professional and expert nurses, and in preventing extra costs for recruitment and orientation of new nurses. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between safety climate and teamwork as perceived by Shebien El-Kom hospitals’ nurses. Design: This study demonstrates a non-experimental, descriptive co-relational design. Setting: The study was conducted at two hospitals, namely Shebien El-Kom University Hospital and Shebien El-Kom Teaching Hospital, in Menoufiya Governorate, Egypt. Subjects: A convenience sample of 140 nurses was taken from the two hospitals. It consisted of all nurses available at the time of the study. Tool: One tool was used to collect the necessary data: the study’s questionnaire consists of three parts: Socio demographic data, safety climate scale, and teamwork scale. Results: Indicates that the highest percentages of nurses (92.2%) who had high level of team work climate had high level of safety climate. Conversely, the highest percentages of nurses (81.8%) who had moderate level of team work climate had moderate level of safety climate. They were highly statistically significant, strong positive correlation between nurses’ overall perception level of safety climate from one side and their overall perception level of team work climate (r = 0.492 , p<0.001). Conclusion: This study concluded that teamwork climate has an effect on patient safety climate among nurses. Recommendations: Developing strategies that create a culture of safety and teamwork climate to improve nurses satisfaction and retention as well as patient outcomes in hospitals, nurse educators should increase the involvement of the concepts of safety climate and teamwork in nursing curricula for improving nurses appreciation of collaboration and team spirit, further studies are needed for examining the relationships between perception of nurses working in critical care units and perception of nurses working in general wards in two dimensions. And further in-depth exploration in this issue is recommended to study an effect teamwork climate on patient safety climate from the perspective of nurses, head nurses and physicians in selected hospitals.