Open AccessPsychological Safety in the Emergency Department during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Single Centre Survey Study
Author(s) -
Fatimah Lateef
Publication year - 2022
Language(s) - English
DOI - 10.54026/crem/1027
Subject(s) - psychological intervention , psychological safety , emergency department , feeling , seniority , pandemic , patient safety , occupational safety and health , psychology , safety culture , mental health , inclusion (mineral) , baseline (sea) , health care , medicine , medical emergency , nursing , covid-19 , applied psychology , psychiatry , social psychology , engineering , political science , management , disease , pathology , law , infectious disease (medical specialty) , economics , aerospace engineering
The Emergency Department represents a complex healthcare setting for delivery of acute and emergent care, 24 hours a day. We set out to measure the level of psychological safety among emergency department staff during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We have employed Clark TR’s definition of psychological safety, which comes in four stages namely: Inclusivity, Learning Safety, Contributory Safety and Challenger Safety to carry this out through the use of a series of questions. Our team also decided to innovate and add another domain known as Behavioural Safety. This was thus considered as the fifth stage of psychological safety in our survey. As this is the first such survey on psychological safety conducted in our ED, we intended to view these parameters and domains as a baseline, for future studies as well as interventions. Moreover, having been through the Covid-19 pandemic, we do realise there may be some new perspectives, feelings and behaviours, which may have become inculcated by the experience of the staff. We thus felt this would be beneficial in gauging the current state of psychological safety as well as the future directions and trajectory we can plan for our survey results showed that across all the stages of psychological safety in the emergency department, doctors demonstrated a higher level of psychological safety as compared to nurses; with inclusion safety, learning safety and behaviour safety being the highest, whilst challenger safety was the lowest. In addition, there were no significant differences during subgroup analysis on gender and seniority and its impact on psychological safety.