Turkish Adaptation of the Scale of the Attitudes to Patient Safety: Nursing Student Sample

Objective: Medical errors are very important problems in all health institutions around the world. Creating a patient safety culture is very important in reducing medical errors. Nurses have a special importance in terms of maintaining patient safety. Knowledge, skills and attitudes that can help improve patient safety and reduce medical errors can be gained through nursing education. There is no valid and reliable tool to measure nursing students' attitudes towards patient safety culture. The aim of the research was to investigate whether the Turkish version of the patient safety attitude scale was a valid and reliable tool for nursing students.Methods: The study, which was designed methodologically, was carried out between February and April 2019. It was conducted with third-and fourth-year students (n=226) in the nursing department of a private university in Istanbul after obtaining ethical approval and institutional permissions.Results: According to the results of the analysis, it was found that the original scale did not generally comply with the factor structure. The scale was composed of 22 items and 4 factors. The total variance of the scale was 65.14%. As a result of the reliability analysis, Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the scale was calculated as 0.91.Conclusion: The scale that was developed by Carruthers et al. in 2009, was found to be a valid and reliable measurement tool that could be used to measure the attitude of nursing students towards patient safety in Turkey.