THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN QUALITY AND INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGEMENT, AND SAFETY CLIMATE IN HEALTHCARE

The purpose of this paper is to determine the functional relationships among information security, patient safety climate, and quality management dimensions within a healthcare system. A cross-sectional, observational study was conducted among the healthcare staff of a state university training and research hospital. The safety climate scale and quality and information security management (QISM) scale were used to collect data from a sample of 389 participants. Canonical correlation analysis was conducted to evaluate the relationship between QISM and safety climate. Organizational safety and departmental safety were the strong contributors to safety climate while quality management, information security, and general requirements, contributed to the QISM. Examining the signs of the cross loadings indicated that all the independent and dependent variables positively correlated with safety climate, and QISM. The results indicated a significant and robust positive relationship between QISM and safety climate. Making improvements in quality and information security may provide positive results on improving patient safety climate. Along the same lines, promoting a patient safety climate may also improve healthcare quality and information security.