SAFETY CULTURE AND EMPLOYEES PERFORMANCE IN SAFETY-RELATED UNITS OF THE TEACHING HOSPITALS IN SOUTH EAST, NIGERIA.

Abstract

Workplace safety incidents are national as well as global issues hence managers work tirelessly to inculcate safety values within the organisation by providing basic job resources which mitigate the negative effect of job demand especially during emergency situations. But the seemly inability of managers of the focused teaching hospitals in Southeast, Nigeria to conduct safety training and program, provide job resources and steady communication seem to have hampered their safety performance as it was observed that Healthcare Workers(HCWs) contract the same disease from infected patients. The study was anchored on Job Demand-Resource Theory which posits that health impairment occurs when there is disturbance in the equilibrium between the job demand that employees are faced with and the resources at their disposal. The study employed descriptive and correlation research design. Three teaching hospitals were selected from both Federal and State Teaching Hospitals based on the populations of respondents where as no teaching Hospital was selected from private teaching hospital since there is none in the area. The study adopted complete enumeration technique and 176 copies of questionnaire were distributed to HCWs but only 127 were positively responded to. The study adopted content validity and Cronbach Alpha method was used to ascertain the internal consistency and the reliability coefficient of 0.876 was obtained and this was judged adequate for the study. The hypotheses were tested using Pearson Product Moment Coefficient. Correlation coefficient (r) values of 0.475, 0.818 and 0.482 were got from the test of hypotheses 1, 2 and 3 respectively. The results revealed that there is a significant and positive relationship among the variables under study. From the findings, it is recommended that management of the teaching hospitals need to provide basic job resources, maintain steady flow of information and conduct safety programs and training for HCWs so as to increase employee perceived value on safety.