A culture of safety is the shared commitment of management and employees to ensure the safety of the work environment. A culture of safety permeates all aspects of the work environment, and it encourages every individual in an organization to project a level of awareness and accountability for safety.

Strategies include:¹

• Ensuring that there is a commitment to safety at all levels of the organization, beginning with management.
• Reporting incidents without assigning blame to individuals.
• Involving employees in planning and implementing activities that promote a safe health-care environment.
• Identifying and removing injury hazards in the work environment (e.g., proper placement of sharps containers, wearing heavy utility gloves during operatory cleanup and instrument processing, eliminating two-handed recapping of used anesthetic needles).
• Developing communication and feedback links to increase safety awareness (e.g., have front line staff give their opinions about new sharps safety devices).
• Promoting individual accountability.

¹CDC, NIOSH. Stop sticks campaign, safety culture. Accessed February 2019 at: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/stopsticks/safetyculture.html.