The relation of nurses' workload and working environment conditions with safety of patients hospitalized in wards of Tohid and Be'sat medical centers of Sanandaj in 2013

Security and safety are an important part of nursery care and they bring about responsibility for everyone involved with the task of health care. Different studies have showed that most mistakes about patients have been made by nurses, which is mainly due to heavy workloads, fatigue, occupational stress, insufficient number of nurses relative to number of patients, shortage of time due to number of assigned patients to them, and so on. Therefore, pinpointing consequences of nurses' heavy workloads and working environment conditions and their effect on safety of patients hospitalized in different wards is critically important. Method: The study is a descriptive analytical research. The subjects consisted of 200 nurses working in the wards of Tohid and Be'sat Medical Centers. A simple random method was employed to select the sample. They were required to fill in a questionnaire. Then, after the questionnaire was coded, the collected data were fed into SPSS 18.0 software and descriptive statistics (frequency distribution, mean, variance, standard deviation) and one-side variance analysis test were utilized to analyze them. Results: The results of the study showed that 85of the patients were female and 72 were married. Regarding their age, 49 aged 21-30, 30 aged 31-40, and 21 were over 41 years old. Regarding their work experience, 53.5 had been working for less than 6 years, 20 had worked for 7 years, and 17.5 had been serving for 13 years or more. Sufficiency of number of nurses in each shift was 59. Regarding team coordination between the manager and the nurses, appropriate communication was 14.1. And suitable facilities in workplace and training section were 27.5. Regarding prescription delivery and care, there was the highest mistake frequency of 67.5 and 56.5, respectively. Generally, only 14.5 of the nurses stated that they had not made mistakes in their services and 58 of them had made at least four mistakes. There was no significant difference between mean of mistakes in different workloads and number of mistakes made by nursery personnel with working environment conditions. Discussion: Researchers believe that nurses' workload is the result of nursery standards, the nurses' experience and specialty, the institution's policies and procedures, available equipment, and other individuals' healthcare activities. Regarding prescription delivery and healthcare, there was respectively 67.5 and 56.5 mistake frequencies. And only 14.5 of the nurses had made no mistakes in conducting nursery service. In Harding and Patrick's study, medicine mistakes were related to lack of experience in prescription delivery 42 and heavy workloads and lack of attention 27. In Nikpeyma's study, 53 of the participants were reported to make at least one medicine mistake. Absorni reported that nurses refused to report their medicine mistakes due to shame, feeling of guilty, and fear of being punished and fired. In our study, there was no significant relation between number of mistakes and workloads. Moreover, the correlation between mean number of nurses' mistakes and working environment conditions was insignificant at P=0/7. The patients' health is necessary in improving nursery care quality, and all nurses are fully responsible for maintaining the patients' safety in all aspects of healthcare including informing them and their co-workers about probable dangers and the way of tackling them, protecting the patients' safety, and reporting irrelevant events to an authority