Adaptation and Psychometric Evaluation of a Patient Safety Culture Instrument for Home Care-A Multicentre Cross-Sectional Study.

aimsTo adapt an instrument to measure patient safety culture, as rated by home care workers, and examine its psychometric properties.

designA multicentre cross-sectional psychometric study.

methodsWe adapted the Nursing Home Survey SOPS to measure safety culture in home care. The questionnaire was translated to French following the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretest and Documentation (TRAPD) approach. Experts in home care evaluated the content validity of the adapted and translated instrument. To pre-test the questionnaire, we conducted cognitive interviews. We invited home care workers from two home care agencies in the French-speaking region of Switzerland to participate in the cross-sectional study from November to December 2024. We performed confirmatory factor analysis using the R package 'lavaan' and assessed convergent, discriminant and known-groups validity.

resultsEight experts assessed the content validity of the adapted and translated instrument. Responses from 672 home care workers were analysed. Except for compliance with procedures, all dimensions showed acceptable or good internal consistency. Regarding construct validity, first-order and second-order level confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable model fit. Safety culture correlated with overall patient safety rating and psychosocial safety climate. Regarding known-groups validity, participants who do not work directly with clients most of the time, and those willing to recommend the organisation rated the safety culture higher.

conclusionThe psychometric evaluation indicated that the adapted instrument can be used as a valid and targeted tool to assess patient safety climate/culture in Swiss French-speaking home care agencies. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PROFESSION AND/OR PATIENT CARE: The existence of an adapted and validated instrument for use in home care enables managers to monitor safety culture and develop interventions to improve it and consequently ensure patient safety. IMPACT: To the best of our knowledge, there was no instrument specifically targeting the measurement of patient safety culture in the home care setting. The adapted instrument for home care showed to be a valid tool to provide information about safety culture in this setting. The availability of an instrument to measure safety culture in the home care setting can promote its monitoring, raise awareness of safety culture among staff, help managers prioritise key aspects for culture change, and thus improve patient safety. A wider adoption of the same instrument could also facilitate comparative analyses. REPORTING

methodWe used the COSMIN guidelines for the psychometric evaluation of the instrument and the STROBE reporting guidelines for the cross-sectional study. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: This study did not include patient or public involvement in its design, conduct or reporting.