psychological safety in nursing

If nursing or multidisciplinary team members are new to the team, psychological safety can suffer. Creating an environment of inclusion for everyone from the chief to the clinical nurse, pharmacist, nursing assistant, respiratory therapist, housekeeper, and clerk is mission critical.

Psychological safety allows healthcare professionals to take the interpersonal risks needed to engage in effective teamwork and to maintain patient safety. In order to improve psychological safety in healthcare teams, an in-depth understanding of the complex and nuanced nature of psychological safety is needed.

Psychological safety has emerged as a critical feature of high-performing teams across many industries, including health care. It facilitates patient safety, quality improvement, learning, and innovation.

An analysis of 88 articles studying psychological safety in health care identified five attributes: perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks, strong interpersonal relationships, group‐level phenomenon, safe work environment for taking interpersonal risks and non‐punitive culture.

The overall objective is to instill psychological safety at the individual, team, and organizational level. The areas of action are described as having three core pillars for ultimate outcomes of psychologically safe practice that include patient safety, quality improvement, and well-being.

An exploration of the presence of psychological safety present in healthcare workers, the methods utilised to assess psychological safety, and the potential consequences of high or low psychological safety.

This review presents an overview of psychological safety in medicine, describing its impact on learning, patient safety, and quality improvement. The review also explores interventions and essential leadership behaviors that foster psychological safety in teams.

As a team, we can strive to enhance psychological safety and develop strategies to repair the psychologically unsafe workplace if low levels of psychological safety are detected. There are several key strategies that nurse leaders can employ to promote psychological safety.

Psychological safety is a key component of workplace well-being and refers to the shared belief that an individual or team feels included, safe to learn and contribute, and safe to express their ideas and perspectives without the fear of embarrassment, judgment, or retribution.

Psychological safety plays a vital role in helping people overcome barriers to learning and change in interpersonally challenging work environments. 1 Psychological safety is team members' shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as speaking up or asking for help, a salient variable in work environments where learn...