Analyzing Healthcare Safety Climate Through A Collaborative Filtering of Safety Attitudes Questionnaire for A Hospital Case Study

ABSTRACT Background Patient safety climate in healthcare is an important element to improve quality of current healthcare system globally. Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ), one of measurable tools for patient safety climate, is applied as an effective research survey to collect opinions and information from medical workers in a long term. Method SAQ data in this study consists of medical employee scores to 46 questions in 8 aspects or dimensions and personal information during 2014 to 2017 from a teaching hospital. A quantitative analysis with a core user based collaborative filtering method is conducted to analyze the SAQ data for discovering the latent inter-related pattern among different SAQ aspects of sub-sectors in this hospital for four years. Results There are not interrelationships between these 8 independent aspects for wards at different level (A, B and C) consistently across 4 years. The correlation patterns of aspects are not strong consistent over years for wards. Conclusion Observations in this study can be used to support understanding patient safety climate assessment. They are contributed to further study in this area and understand SAQ aspects dynamically in a real hospital case.