Articles

An Empirical Investigation of Safety Climate in Emergency Medical Technicians in Iran

Abstract

This paper discusses empirical research aimed at investigating the most important dimensions of safety climate from Emergency Medical technician’s perspective. Investigation was conducted through the safety climate questionnaire (SCQ) in Tehran Emergency Organization. After a literature review, a 21-item questionnaire was developed and administered to 600 technicians. In order to indentify the structure of safety climate Factor analysis was used with varimax rotation method using SPSS 17 software. Data on safety climate were collected by completed questionnaire from 266 technicians with a response rate of 44%. Safety climate attributes were conducted to reduce by Factor analysis and identified five critical safety dimensions which together explained 61% of the total variance. One way ANOVA results show that there were no statistically significant differences for characteristics such as age, experience and job category at the 5% significance level. Employees’ perceptions on the five safety climate dimensions differ significantly among the four groups on the basis of their factor scores in safety climate dimensions at the p< 0.05 significance level. In order to improve safety climate, based on the study results, more attention should be paid to safety training and management support.

Guldenmund FW. The nature of safety culture: A review of theory and research. Saf Sci 2000; 34: 215–257.

Flin R, Mearns K, O’Conner P, Bryden R. Measuring safety climate: Identifying the common features. Saf Sci 2000; 34: 177–192.

Anonymus. Available from:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_climate

Cooper D. Improving Safety Culture: A Practical Guide. 1st ed, John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, 1998.

Prasad SVS Raja, Reghunath KP. Empirical Analysis of Construction Safety Climate – A Study. IJEST 2010, 2(6): 1699-1707.

Budworth N. The development and evaluation of a safety climate measure as a diagnostic tool in safety management. IOSH Journal 1997; 1: 19-29.

cheyne ATJ, Cox S, Oliver A. Modeling safety climate in the prediction of levels of safety activity. Work Stress 1998; 12: 255–271.

Huang YH, Chen JC, DeArmond S. Role of safety climate and shift work on perceived injury risk: A multi-level analysis. Accid Anal Prev 2007; 39: 1088–1096.

Department of Health. An organization with a memory: report of an expert group on learning from adverse events in the NHS. London: The Stationery Office, 2000.

Kohn LT, Corrigan JM, Donaldson MS. To err is human: building a safer health system, Institute of Medicine Report. Washington DC, National Academy Press, 2000.

Zohar D. Safety climate in industrial organizations: theoretical and applied implications. J Appl Psychol 1980; 65: 96–102.

DeJoy D, Schaffer BS, Wilson MG, Vandenberg RJ, Butts MM. Creating safer workplaces: Assessing the determinants and role of safety climate. J Safety Res 2004; 35: 81− 90.

Moore D, Gamage B, Bryce E. Protecting health care workers from SARS and other respiratory pathogens. Organizational and individual factors that affect adherence to infection control guidelines. Am J Infect Control 2005; 33(2): 88− 96.

Robyn R.M Gershon, Christine D Karkashian, James W Grosch, Lawrence R Murphy, Antonio Escamilla-Cejudo, Patricia A Flanagan, Edward Bernacki, Christine Kasting, Linda Martin. Hospital safety climate and its relationship with safe work practices and workplace exposure incidents. Am J Infect Control 2000; 28 (3): 211-221.

Colla JB, Bracken AC, Kinney LM. Measuring patient safety climate: a review of surveys. Qual Saf Health Care 2005; 14: 364 – 6.

Flin R, Burns C, Means K. Measuring safety climate in health care. Qual Saf Health Care 2006; 15: 109 – 15.

Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics" (HTML). US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos101.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Technician.

Patterson PD. The Emergency Medical Services Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. Am J Med Qual 2010; 25 (2): 109-115.

Sexton JB, Helmreich RL, Neilands TB. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire: psychometric properties, benchmarking data, and emerging research. BMC Health Serv Res 2006; 6: 44.

Lynne MC, Judy LP. On-line Patient Safety Climate Survey: Tool Development and Lessons Learned. Advances in Patient Safety 2008; 4: 415 - 428.

Wayne T, William D. Evaluation of a healthcare safety climate measurement tool. J Safety Res 2008; 39: 563–568.

Hair J, Anderson R, Tatham R, Black W (1995). Multivariate data analysis with readings (4th edition). Englewood Cliffs, NJ’ Prentice Hall International.

Churchill GA. A paradigm for developing better measures of marketing constructs. J Mark Res 1979; 16(1): 64-73.

Churchill GA. Marketing research: methodological foundation (5th ed). New York the Dryden Press, 1991.

Kim JO, Muller CW. Introduction to factor analysis: what it is and how to do it. Series: Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 1978.

Nunnally JC. Psychometric theory. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978.

Sekaran U. Research methods for business. 2nd ed, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1992.

Files
IssueVol 3 No 2 (2011) QRcode
SectionArticles
 
Keywords
Safety climate Factor analysis

Rights and permissions
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
1.
Vosoughi S, Oostakhan M. An Empirical Investigation of Safety Climate in Emergency Medical Technicians in Iran. Int J Occup Hyg. 1;3(2):70-75.