Campus Location
Dallas Campus (Online)
Date of Award
5-2021
Document Type
DNP Project
Department
Nursing
Degree Name
Doctor of Nursing Practice
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Catherine Garner
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Tonja Hartjes
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Linda Gibson
Abstract
A culture of safety in healthcare settings supports a caring environment and practices that produce quality patient outcomes. Leadership is instrumental in creating a culture of safety. The purpose of this quantitative pretest-posttest design project was to determine if the implementation of leader rounds in an acute care hospital had an impact on staff nurses’ perceptions of safety culture as measured by the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. The setting was a midsize acute care hospital with a target population of dayshift nurses working in the telemetry service line. Leader rounds were conducted over a six-week timeline by the department director. Data analysis was conducted using a paired-samples t test. The major finding of this study was a reduction in the post safety score after the implementation of leader rounds; however, it was not statistically significant. There are significant factors that may explain the findings in this study. The leaders conducting rounds were middle management rather than executive-level leaders. The staff exposure to leader rounds showed that only a small minority of staff had participated in leader rounds over the six-week time frame. Lastly, during the study period, the hospital units experienced a heavy influx of COVID-19 patients, resulting in higher acuity patients and a higher than normal volume of acutely ill patients on these units. Despite the drop in perception of a culture of safety, a majority of the participants wanted leader rounds to continue. Hospital leaders should continue to evaluate the role of rounding absent a population crisis and with modifications to ensure staff participation.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ray, Heather D., "Impact of Leader Rounds on Perceptions of the Culture of Safety" (2021). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 370.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/370