Health Care Workers' Perception of Patient Safety During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Opportunities and Challenges

Introduction

Patient safety culture The concept of patient safety culture has become one of the strategies in health care institutions that seeks to intervene on adverse events, understood as: the set of characteristics, skills and attitudes, perceptions, abilities, competencies, among others, that are developed within the institutions and their members, which establish the commitment and capabilities to maintain and manage safety in health care in all processes that are developed within the organization. The issue of safety culture is part of the DNA of each organization, involving their operational processes and the perspective of how they manage them, with a view to becoming "highly reliable organizations", being institutions that despite working in very high risk situations, the presence of adverse events, accidents or complications is very low.

Therefore, it is important to understand the patient's perception of safety that allows the evaluation of dimensions such as: commitment of the directives, processes of institutional continuous improvement, systems of notification of events and incidents, communication and climate of confidence, fundamental dimensions at the moment of measuring the culture. However, it is also important to assess how these dimensions have been impacted at times of a pandemic such as the current COVID19 , where around 29,000,000 positive cases and 1 million deaths are reported worldwide, a situation for which institutions and countries were not prepared and which may impact on patient safety processes, mediated by high levels of stress and anxiety in the health team work overload due to increased care and disability leave of workers who have acquired the virus.

Therefore, this study seeks to examine health care workers' perceptions of patient safety during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Rationale