Innovative Approaches for Safety Culture Improvement in Healthcare Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Improvements in patient safety have been made in some areas over the last twenty years. One area that has proved very difficult to change and improve upon is safety culture. Attempts have been made at the local and national levels to move beyond a blame culture; however, belief among healthcare workers is that blame is still very much part of their culture. There have been different approaches purported to move towards a more mature safety culture, including shifting towards just and restorative cultures. This Special Issue calls for papers that present innovative approaches to understanding and changing safety culture in healthcare. Papers that show evidence of taking a systems perspective in terms of both understanding culture as an emergent property of the system and something that shapes the system, and in attempting to improve safety culture and ultimately patient and staff safety, will be particularly welcome.  

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Systems approaches to understanding safety culture in healthcare;
• Moving beyond surveys to analyse healthcare safety culture;
• The influence of safety culture on health system functioning, patient and staff safety;
• Just culture in healthcare;
• Restorative culture in healthcare; 
• Just culture—as being in right relationship – what would this mean in healthcare.

Dr. Marie Ward
Dr. Eva Doherty
Dr. Siobhán Corrigan
Guest Editors

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