Registered nurses’ collective safety organising behaviours: the association with perceptions of patient safety culture

The cultivation of patient safety cultures is critical for the sustainability of positive patient outcomes. At the core of safety cultures are the safety organising behaviours of its workers. Yet, the assessment of patient safety culture in healthcare settings are usually associated with professional characteristics such as role, rank and their practice settings. Little attention has been given to exploring how collective safety organising behaviours of healthcare workers, in particular registered nurses, may be implicated in the perceptions of patient safety culture. The purpose of this paper was to examine the association between nurses’ collective safety organising behaviours and their perceptions of patient safety culture. This study utilised a cross-sectional design. A total of 381 nurses from 11 medical–surgical units completed questionnaires. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that after controlling for key confounding variables, collective safety organising behaviours had significant associations with teamwork, communication openness, manager support, organisational learning, overall perceptions, feedback about errors, frequency of event reports, staffing, non-punitive response to error and safety grade for work area. Safety organising behaviours may provide additional insights into the black box of organisational contextual factors that may be implicated in perceptions of patient safety culture among nurses.