SafeQuest climate measure

Abstract

The SafeQuest is a specialized, thirty-item instrument developed to measure the safety climate within primary care organizations. It is designed for comprehensive use, targeting all members of the primary care team, including those in clinical, non-clinical, practice-based, and community-based roles. The questionnaire is systematically divided into five distinct sections, allowing for a detailed assessment of various organizational factors contributing to safety perception.

Keywords

SafeQuest, primary care, safety climate, healthcare assessment, organizational safety, Workload, Teamwork, Leadership, psychometrics, quality improvement.

Authors

De Wet, C., Spence, W., Mash, R., Johnson, P., & Bowie, P.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the SafeQuest measure is to systematically assess and quantify the perceptions of safety climate among staff working specifically within primary care settings. By capturing these perceptions, the tool aids organizations in identifying areas of strength and weakness regarding safety culture and guides targeted quality improvement initiatives. It provides a standardized mechanism for internal benchmarking and longitudinal monitoring of organizational safety efforts.

Construct

The SafeQuest instrument measures the psychological construct of safety climate, which reflects the shared perceptions among organizational members regarding safety policies, procedures, and practices. This climate is operationalized through five core domains, which together capture the complexity of safety within a high-stakes healthcare environment. These domains include: Workload, Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, and Safety systems. These factors address both latent conditions (systems) and active failures (communication/teamwork) that influence patient and staff safety.

Validity

The validity of the SafeQuest measure was established through a comprehensive psychometric evaluation detailed in the 2010 seminal publication by De Wet et al. The development process focused on ensuring strong content validity, where items were derived from literature review and expert consultation specific to the primary care context. Construct validity was supported by the resulting factor structure, confirming that the thirty items adequately loaded onto the five intended theoretical dimensions, differentiating the scale from more generic organizational climate measures.

Reliability

Initial reliability assessments, conducted during the scale’s development and validation process, demonstrated that the SafeQuest possesses robust internal consistency. While specific Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients for the overall scale and its sub-factors are detailed in the key reference, the successful psychometric evaluation confirms the stability and consistency of the measure. The reliability ensures that the instrument consistently measures the same latent constructs across repeated administrations within similar primary care populations.

Factor Analysis

The structure of the SafeQuest was determined through rigorous factor analysis, which resulted in the identification of five distinct, yet interrelated, subscales. The thirty items are distributed across these five factors, which represent key elements of the primary care safety environment. The successful extraction of these factors—Workload, Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, and Safety systems—provides strong evidence for the scale’s underlying theoretical model and its utility in diagnosing organizational deficiencies.

Instrument

Test Type: Organizational Safety Climate Questionnaire / Self-Report Tool

Format: Thirty-item questionnaire utilizing a summated rating scale format (Likert-type scale is implied).

Language Available: English (Primary language of development).

Population Group: Healthcare professionals and administrative staff.

Age Group: Adults (working age population).

Population Details: All members of the primary care team, including clinical (e.g., GPs, nurses) and non-clinical staff, regardless of whether they are practice-based or community-based.

Test Methodology: The survey can be distributed and completed electronically via the designated online platform (hf.gpsafetyclimate.com). Registration on the platform allows practice teams to generate automated safety climate reports based on their aggregated responses.

Keywords

healthcare safety, organizational culture, quality and safety in healthcare, primary care organizations, staff perception, organizational assessment tools.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided in source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided in source material.

Correspondence Address: Not provided in source material.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The SafeQuest instrument was initially developed and validated in 2010. Practice teams have the option to register free of charge at hf.gpsafetyclimate.com to distribute the survey electronically. The ability to register and generate a safety climate report suggests that the tool is accessible and intended for widespread use within the primary care sector, often without explicit administration fees for standard use.

Reference’s

• De Wet, C., Spence, W., Mash, R., Johnson, P., & Bowie, P. (2010). The development and psychometric evaluation of a safety climate measure for primary care. Quality & Safety in Healthcare, 19, 578-584. https://dx.doi.org/10.1136/qshc.2009.034529

Items of the SafeQuest climate measure

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

The individual items of the SafeQuest climate measure are not provided in the source content. The tool consists of thirty items structured across five sections: 1. Workload, 2. Communication, 3. Leadership, 4. Teamwork and 5. Safety systems. The original PDF master copy of the questionnaire can be downloaded here: safety_climate_questionnaire_mastercopy