Building a Strong Safety Culture

As a healthcare intern, you’re stepping into an environment where patient safety is paramount. Hospitals are bustling places with complex systems designed to protect patients, staff, and visitors. For interns, understanding and embracing a safety culture is essential for fostering a safe and supportive work environment.

What Safety Culture!

Safer Care Victoria defines it as “shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and practices related to safety within an organisation” (1). Enabling factors of safety culture includes leadership, organisational policies, overall commitment, group cohesion, psychological safety and educational safety (2). Therefore, a strong leadership is vital and initiatives to assess the safety culture and improving safety culture helping the community and providing the needs of the service areas. Encouraging behaviours of teamwork, effective communication, incident reporting and a no blame culture will assist in a positive safety culture (1).

Leadership Role in Safety Culture

Leadership plays a pivotal role in establishing and maintaining a strong safety culture within a healthcare setting. Managers play a crucial part in influencing and implementing the leadership strategic direction to action and assist in shaping the patient safety culture (3). Leaders at every level from clinical supervisors to department heads set the tone for a safety-first environment. As an intern, understanding how leadership influences safety culture can deepen your appreciation for its importance and inspire you to develop your own leadership skills over time. Compassion plays an important factor which positively impacts the quality of care to patients and overall satisfaction of staff too (4). Staff issues vary under different circumstances and exposures to incidences. This is where managers can offer compassion and understanding to assist with staff needs.

Setting the Vision:

Effective leaders align with the organisation values and vision. Ensure that everyone on the team aligns with this shared goal.

Modelling Behaviour:

Leaders lead by example. When supervisors and senior staff set standards, it demonstrates their commitment and encourages others to do the same. As a health management intern, it is good to practice critical thinking about improving not only patient safety processes but also the wider clinical and non-clinical staff.

Encouraging Open Communication:

Leaders foster a culture of transparency by creating an environment where staff and interns feel safe speaking up about safety concerns either its psychosocial or physical hazards. Effective communication within healthcare teams is related to patient outcomes, which includes better coordination, patient satisfaction, a culture of safety and collaborative decision making (5). Openness in communication is key to building trust.

Supporting Training and Development:

Strong leaders invest in continuous education, ensuring that all staff have access to the tools and knowledge needed to uphold safety standards. Interns benefit from this commitment through either online training modules, professional developments organised by ACHSM to be an effective leader.

Developing your leadership skills

Even as an intern, you can begin cultivating leadership qualities that contribute to a strong safety culture:

• Be Proactive: Take the initiative to learn and follow safety protocols, understand and observe the nature of the environment, and ask questions.
• Practice Accountability: Acknowledge and learn from mistakes. Taking responsibility shows maturity and builds trust among your team. No one is perfect and we all make mistakes, though it is important to try.
• Communicate Effectively: Be clear, concise and speak up regarding expectations and this will enable your direct supervisor to understand your circumstances or issues.
• Support Your Team: Offer assistance to colleagues and share related insights you’ve learned.
  Embrace Feedback: Use feedback from supervisors to refine your skills and show your commitment to personal growth and safety.

Safety culture at is about learning, teamwork, and trust and making a real difference in patient care. Your experience as an intern being part of a team that values your contributions and is committed to helping you grow. Every action you take to support safety, from communication to problem-solving, strengthens the bond within your team and enhances the quality of care.

Disclaimer: Views are those of individual authors and not those of ACHSM or management intern’s employers.

Reference

1. Safe Care Victoria. Victorian Safety Culture Guide Designed for Boards, CEOs, and Executives In: Health Do, editor. Victoria: Safe Care Victoria, ; 2024.
2. Kilcullen MP, Bisbey TM, Ottosen MJ, Tsao K, Salas E, Thomas EJ. The Safer Culture Framework: An Application to Healthcare Based on a Multi-Industry Review of Safety Culture Literature. Hum Factors. 2022;64(1):207-27.
3. Gutberg J, Berta W. Understanding middle managers’ influence in implementing patient safety culture. BMC Health Serv Res. 2017;17(1):582-.
4. Ahmed Z, Ellahham S, Soomro M, Shams S, Latif K. Exploring the impact of compassion and leadership on patient safety and quality in healthcare systems: a narrative review. BMJ Open Qual. 2024;13(Suppl 2):e002651.
5. Schilling S, Armaou M, Morrison Z, Carding P, Bricknell M, Connelly V. Understanding teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care: A systematic review of reviews. PloS one. 2022;17(8):e0272942-e.