Calvin Burns

Measuring safety climate in health care

Aim: To review quantitative studies of safety climate in health care to examine the psychometric properties of the questionnaires designed to measure this construct. Method: A systematic literature review was undertaken to study sample and questionnaire design characteristics (source, no of items, scale type), construct validity (content validity, factor structure and internal reliability, concurrent validity), within group agreement, and level of analysis. Results: Twelve studies were examined. There was a lack of explicit theoretical underpinning for most questionnaires and some instruments did not report standard psychometric criteria. Where this information was available, several questionnaires appeared to have limitations. Conclusions: More consideration should be given to psychometric factors in the design of healthcare safety climate instruments, especially as these are beginning to be used in large scale surveys across healthcare organisations.

Explicit and Implicit Trust Within Safety Culture

Safety culture is an important topic for managers in high-hazard industries because a deficient safety culture has been linked to organizational accidents. Many researchers have argued that trust plays a central role in models of safety culture but trust has rarely been measured in safety culture/climate studies. This article used explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect) measures to assess trust at a UK gas plant. Explicit measures assessed trust by asking workers to consider and state their attitude to attitude objects. Implicit measures assessed trust in a more subtle way by using a priming task that relies on automatic attitude activation. The results show that workers expressed explicit trust for their workmates, supervisors, and senior managers, but only expressed implicit trust for their workmates. The article proposes a model that conceptualizes explicit trust as part of the surface levels of safety culture and implicit trust as part of the deeper levels of safety culture. An unintended finding was the positive relationship between implicit measures of trust and distrust, which suggests that trust and distrust are separate constructs. The article concludes by considering the implications for safety culture and trust and distrust in high-hazard industries.

'Cyber Gurus': A rhetorical analysis of the language of cybersecurity specialists and the implications for security policy and critical infrastructure protection

Abstract This paper draws on the psychology of risk and “management guru” literature (Huczynski, 2006) to examine how cybersecurity risks are constructed and communicated by cybersecurity specialists. We conduct a rhetorical analysis of ten recent cybersecurity publications ranging from popular media to academic and technical articles. We find most cybersecurity specialists in the popular domain use management guru techniques and manipulate common cognitive limitations in order to over-dramatize and over-simplify cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure (CI). We argue there is a role for government: to collect, validate and disseminate more data among owners and operators of CI; to adopt institutional arrangements with an eye to moderating exaggerated claims; to reframe the debate as one of trade-offs between threats and opportunities as opposed to one of survival; and, finally, to encourage education programs in order to stimulate a more informed debate over the longer term.

Risk information source preferences in construction workers

Purpose – Many researchers have investigated the determinants of workers’ risk-taking/unsafe behaviours as a way to improve safety management and reduce accidents but there has been a general lack of research about workers’ risk information seeking behaviours or their source preferences for risk information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether occupational risk information source preference was risk independent (i.e. whether workers prefer to receive occupational risk information from proximal sources like supervisors and workmates regardless of the nature of the risk or the sources expertise regarding that risk, or if they discriminated between information sources based on the type of risk being considered). Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 106 frontline construction workers who were recruited from a single building site within the UK with the help of the safety officer on site. The source from which workers preferred to receive information about a range of risks wa...

Rationalising the use of Twitter by official organisations during risk events : operationalising the social amplification of risk framework through causal loop diagrams

Communication of health risk events is a complex and challenging task. The advent of information and communication technology along with the following popularisation and widespread uptake of social media are reshaping the field of risk communication. Guided by key tenets of the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, this study developed a causal loop diagram, capturing the perceptions of professionals in health organisations regarding the role of Twitter during risk events. The aim of this paper is to explore the use of the causal loop diagram and its role with rationalising the use of Twitter in risk communication strategies. A key finding of the model is the central role of trust and its interrelationship with other factors during a risk event. A contribution is made to operational research through the novel use of soft system dynamics in risk communication, to risk communication through the investigation of the new medium Twitter and also to research on the Social Amplification of Risk Framework by providing a means through which to operationalise the framework.

Organizational Values: Positive, Ambivalent and Negative Interrelations in Work Organizations

The espousal of organizational values with an expectation of primarily positive consequences in leadership, employee performance and organizational change has often been recognized as overly simplistic, but giving a more complete and critical account of the interrelations between values and behaviour has proven challenging. This article describes a balanced and integrated positive, ambivalent and negative (PAN) approach. The use of this PAN approach is described in the case of a health care organization. Evidence is given from a survey of 96 staff perceptions of their current organizational values, staff evaluations of their colleagues’ demonstration of the organization’s espoused values and content analysis of 35 ‘memorable moments’ regarding what staff had experienced. Using the PAN framework in this case suggests a picture of staff reporting experiences as 50–30–20, respectively, for the PAN approach. The implications of this framework for leadership, employee performance and organizational change are discussed.

Safety Climate in Healthcare: A Review of Measurement Instruments

A deficient safety culture has been implicated in industrial accidents. More recently, patient safety problems in hospital care have revealed a weak safety culture as a causal factor. As in the other industrial sectors, the level of safety for hospital patients and staff is likely to be determined largely by the hospitals safety culture. Measuring safety culture is a risk management technique widely used in high-reliability industries to identify safety problems before they become realised as accidents and near misses. The most common approach to measuring safety culture is to conduct a safety climate survey of the workforce. A safety climate survey typically assesses the workforces attitudes and perceptions about work pressure, communication, reporting and safety systems, and supervision and management commitment to safety. Thus, safety climate surveys provide a range of leading indicators about an organisations underlying safety culture, which need to be understood when designing and implementing safety interventions such as critical incident reporting systems. This paper reviews the construct validity of 13 instruments that have been used to assess safety climate in healthcare. An explanatory model linking safety climate and safety behaviours is proposed in order to develop more valid measures of safety climate in healthcare.