Comparing safety culture and learning culture

THE CULTURE OF PATIENT SAFETY Reporting, Learning and the Culture of Safety

Systems that provide healthcare workers with the opportunity to report hazards, hazardous situations, errors, close calls and adverse events make it possible for an organization that receives such reports to use these opportunities to learn and/or hold people accountable for their actions. When organizational learning is the primary goal, reporting should be confidential, voluntary and easy to ...

On the relation between culture, safety culture and safety management

Safety can be considered an emergent phenomenon, making a systems view imperative if the aim is to evaluate or develop the safety of an entire sociotechnical system. This paper deals with one important component of the systems view – the relation between culture and management. Specifically, we will inspect how the concepts of culture and safety culture can be used in conjunction with the conce...

Safety paradoxes and safety culture

This paper deals with four safety paradoxes: (1) Safety is defined and measured more by its absence than its presence. (2) Defences, barriers and safeguards not only protect a system, they can also cause its catastrophic breakdown. (3) Many organisations seek to limit the variability of human action, primarily to minimise error, but it is this same variability – in the form of timely adjustment...

Safety Culture

The relationship between national culture and safety culture: Implications for international safety culture assessments

In this article, we examine the relationship between safety culture and national culture, and the implications of this relationship for international safety culture assessments. Focussing on Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance (UA) index, a survey study of 13,616 Air Traffic Management employees in 21 European countries found a negative association between safety culture and national norm data for...