Effect of the organizational culture for patient safety in the hospital setting: A systematic review

Objective: To identify the effect of the organizational culture on patient safety in the hospital context. Materials and methods: A systematic review, without meta-analysis, registered in PROSPERO with number CRD42020162981. Cross-sectional and observational studies were selected that assessed the safety environment and safety culture published between 2014 and 2020 in journals indexed in the EMBASE, Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (Literatura Latinoamericana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde, LILACS) via the Virtual Health Library (Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde, BVS), Medline (International Literature in Health Sciences) via PubMed, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). Results: The findings show that a positive safety environment exerts a beneficial effect on the safety culture, favors the notification of events, and enables improvements in the quality of health care. Conclusions: The effective interaction between safety culture and organizational culture is still scarce in the literature. Most of the studies carried out investigate the situational diagnosis and little progress is made in terms of deepening the implications for the professional practice and the repercussions for the safety of hospitalized patients.