Introduction:

The notion of Patient Safety Culture has been developed strongly linked to the concept of “High Reliability Organizations”, as a strategy to face the problem of adverse events.

Objective:

To review the approaches that have prevailed in Patient Safety Culture and describe some tools that have been used for its measurement.

Methodology:

Narrative review focused on the conceptualization of safety culture.

Results:

Technical literature uses the term safety culture with several meanings. The multiple meanings of the term, and particularly the vagueness with the term “safety climate” also involve confusions in the methods and interpretations of measurements. Two main conceptual approaches to the study of the safety culture were identified: the anthropological and the functionalist approaches, the latter being predominant in the development of instruments used to measure Patient Safety Culture, however, their constructs and their metric properties are widely heterogeneous.

Conclusion:

The study of patient safety as developing category, one should use the available measurement approaches with a critical view, integrating information from other sources such as interviews and qualitative studies, including ethnographic approach, to provide more comprehensive and useful tools in the decision-making process aimed at improving the safety and reliability of medical care.

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