Patient Safety Culture, Evidence-Based Practice and Performance in Nursing

Evidence-based practice is a problem-solving approach in which the best available and useful evidence is used by integrating research evidence, clinical expertise, and patient values and preferences to improve health outcomes, service quality, patient safety and clinical effectiveness, and employee performance. This study aimed to identify the effects of nurses’ patient safety culture perceptions and their evidence-based nursing attitudes on the hospital’s patient safety level and employee performance. A cross-sectional design was employed in this study. Participants included nurses working in a state hospital in Burdur, Turkey, and 218 nurses responded to the research instrument (participation rate: 55.7%). Data were collected through face to face interviews that were conducted from February 20–May 20, 2016. The results of the analyses revealed that evidence-based nursing attitudes and hospital safety culture dimensions explained 29.2% of the total variance in the hospital patient safety level, while evidence-based nursing attitudes and hospital safety culture dimensions explained 15.5% of the total variance in nurse performance. The “evidence-based nursing related beliefs and expectations” aspect of the evidence-based nursing attitude dimension, and the “management support for patient safety” aspect of the patient safety culture dimension were significant predictors of nurses’ performance. The present findings add to the increasing interest in improving evidence-based practice and service quality in order to achieve better patient outcomes.