Patient Safety Incident Reporting Behaviour and Associated Factors Among Nurses Working in Public Hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2024)

Background Patient safetyisessentialto thequalityofcaregivento patients, and it remainsachallenge for countries at all stages of development. There appears to be a common acceptance of the necessity of building patient safety culture within health care organizations. Hospitals with a positive patient safety culture are transparent and fair with staff when incidents occur, learn from mistakes, and rather than blaming individuals, look at what went wrong in the system. Health care providers are willing to report the errors but, due to poor reporting system and culture of blame and shame, there exists struggle of disclosure of adverse events. Objective This studyaimed To assess incident reporting behavior and associated factors among Nurses working in Addis Ababa Public hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2024. Methods A cross-sectional institutional-based study was conducted with a total of 233 randomly selected participant samples drawn from six public hospitals in Addis Ababa, between July 16 and September 16, 2024. A structured interviewer-administered questionnaire and observational checklist based on previous studies were employed for data collection. Bivariate and multivariate analysis used a binary logistic regression model to determine the relationships between the dependent variables and the independent variables and the strength of association was calculated as Adjusted Odds Ratios (AOR),and 95% Confidence Interval (CI) at < 0.05 p-value. Result A total of 245 study subjects were recruited. 233 were interviewed yielding response rate of 95.8% of the 233 participants were female (162(69.5%)), and had a degree (145 (62%)). The largest group of study participants reported having 6–10 years of experience in the hospital (53.5%) and in the current unit (40%). Additionally, Degree nurse participants had a 3.027 times greater odd ofofreporting patient safety incident when compared to Diploma Nurse (AOR: 3.027; 95%CI: 1.736–5.279). Nursesthat reported more than 5 years (31.7%) of experience had a 1.71 times greater odd of reporting safety incidents compared to nurses that reported less than 5 years of experience (AOR: 1.71; 95%CI: 1.236–2.379). Conclusion - Safety incident reporting culture score of participants was less than 70%. Training on patient safety and incident reporting positively affects reporting. Clear guidelines should be put onpatient safety and incident reporting. Focus should be given to trainings.