The Role of Personal Integrity in Shaping Healthcare Worker Perceptions of Patient Safety Culture in US Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Abstract Overview: The COVID-19 pandemic strained hospitals in unprecedented ways that required healthcare workers to adapt to and endure challenges, testing their ability to do a good job with the human and technological resources available to them. Using a proxy variable for personal self-integrity (PSI), derived from questions on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPS), this dissertation explores the way workers’ capacity to maintain alignment of their actions and morals shifted during the pandemic.

Conceptual Framework: The investigations within this study can be understood through the Healthcare Workforce Integrity Model, an innovation based on the Job Demands and Resources Model that accounts for the deeply moral nature of healthcare work. The model holds that intensity of job demands and the strength of supportive job resources shape workers’ abilities to maintain PSI in their work. Over a sustained period, this impacts worker energy and motivation, and ultimately, organizational resilience.

Methods: The study uses descriptive statistics and regression modeling based on data from the AHRQ’s HSOPS and data from the Hospital Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), from timeframes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, to analyze shifting perceptions about patient safety culture within the hospital workforce.

Results: Workers’ capacity to maintain their PSI worsened steadily over the pandemic. When patient mortality was higher, workers’ PSI worsened, with particularly acute effects experienced in ICU settings. When hospital workers perceived teamwork and leadership support negatively, and when they perceived that staff were blamed for patient safety problems, their perceptions of their own personal integrity diminished by statistically significant margins. No significant associations indicate that hospital workers’ perceptions of teamwork, leadership support, or being blamed for safetyproblems were more closely tied with their ability to maintain positive PSI during the pandemic than they were before the pandemic.

Conclusions: Organizational solutions are needed to support healthcare workers’ ability to thrive and maintain integrity in non-crisis moments just as much as they are needed during moments of crisis and uncertainty. Achieving this goal can better ensure that healthcare workers feel they can depend on their institutions and its people to do the right thing.