Introduction: Ensuring patient safety is a global challenge that affects healthcare systems across different cultures and societies. For more effective prevention of adverse events, healthcare organizations must create an environment that encourages employees to speak openly about their errors, near misses, or non-compliance with established procedures. Purpose: The purpose of this master’s thesis is to determine the extent to which healthcare professionals have concerns about patient safety, remain silent in the event of an adverse event, and speak up about a potential adverse event. Furthermore, the study aims to examine the relationships between these behaviors, perceived psychological safety in the workplace, perceived stress, and healthcare workers’ job satisfaction. Methods: A non-experimental quantitative research method was used. The sample was recruited using the snowball sampling technique. A total of 165 physicians and nurses participated, completing standardized self-report questionnaires on reporting adverse events, psychological safety in the workplace, and perceived stress, as well as rating their job satisfaction. The analysis included descriptive statistical methods and calculation of correlation coefficients. Results: We found that the participating healthcare professionals experienced patient safety concerns with varying frequency, with some reporting them more than ten times in the past month. On average, they remained silent about these events relatively rarely, but they also spoke up relatively rarely. On average, healthcare professionals reported relatively low levels of stress and fairly high levels of job satisfaction. Both general psychological safety and psychological safety related to reporting adverse events were negatively associated with the frequency of perceived patient safety concerns and with silence but were not associated with the frequency of speaking up about adverse events. Stress showed a moderately strong positive association with perceived patient safety concerns, a strong positive association with silence, and a weak positive association with speaking up. Job satisfaction was weakly negatively associated with perceived concerns and silence, and was not associated with speaking up. Discussion and conclusion: Based on the results, we can conclude that patient safety is important to the participating healthcare workers and that healthcare organizations also maintain a relatively good safety culture. At the same time, we found that discussing adverse events is still relatively rare among employees. The perceived level of stress among employees is relatively low, and employee satisfaction is relatively high. General and reporting-related psychological safety are related to the frequency of perceived patient safety concerns and silence, but not to speaking up. Reporting adverse events is significantly associated with stress and job satisfaction. The research findings showed the importance of psychological safety in the workplaces of healthcare workers. Further research is needed around reporting adverse events and improving patient safety in healthcare systems.
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