Identifying Critical Dimensions of the Patient Safety Culture Affecting Nurses’ Turnover

A lack of understanding of the causes of turnover among nurses is the main threat to patients, as it directly affects the care that staff provide based on the patient safety culture (PSC). Therefore, it is necessary to identify critical dimensions affecting nurses’ turnover.

This study uses the internal data sets of the Chinese version of the safety attitudes questionnaire of a regional teaching hospital in Taiwan from 2015 to 2018 focusing on the turnover of nursing staff who left their jobs in the next coming year (from 2016 to 2019) by employing linear regression with forward selection.

Perceptions of management are the first critical variable to be identified followed by safety climate and teamwork climate. These three dimensions positively influence the overall satisfaction of the PSC from the viewpoints of nurses’ turnover. In contrast, this study concludes that working conditions and job satisfaction might be the dimensions to influence nurses’ leave in this case hospital.

Improving working conditions and job satisfaction to result in a higher overall satisfaction of the PSC might be an approach to reduce nurses’ turnover.