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Current Research in Emergency Medicine
[ ISSN : 2832-5699 ]


Psychological Safety in the Emergency Department during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Single Centre Survey Study

Research Article
Volume 2 - Issue 3 | Article DOI : 10.54026/CREM/1027


Zhang Yuan Helen1 , Aliviya Dutta2 , Fook-Chong Stephanie3 , Nur Aniza Binte Johari4 , Lee Guan Teck5 , Fatimah Lateef6*

1Zhang Yuan Helen, MRCEM, MD, Associate Consultant, Department of Emergency Medicine, Singapore
General Hospital Emergency Department; 1 Hospital Crescent, Outram Rd, Singapore
2Aliviya Dutta, MRCEM, MBBS, Senior Staff Registrar, Department of Emergency Medicine, Singapore
General Hospital Emergency Department; 1 Hospital Crescent, Outram Rd, Singapore
3Fook-Chong Stephanie, MSc, CStat, Senior Research Associate and Biostatistician, Health Services Research
Unit, Singapore General Hospital, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore
4Nur Aniza Binte Johari, Senior Staff Nurse, Department of Emergency Medicine, 1Singapore General
Hospital Emergency Department; 1 Hospital Crescent, Outram Rd, Singapore
5Lee Guan Teck, Senior Staff Nurse, Department of Emergency Medicine, Singapore General Hospital
Emergency Department; 1 Hospital Crescent, Outram Rd, Singapore
6Lateef Fatimah, FRCS (A&E, Edin), MBBS, Professor and Senior Consultant, Department of Emergency
Medicine, Singapore General Hospital Emergency Department; 1 Hospital Crescent, Outram Rd, Duke-NUS
Graduate Medical School, 8 College Road, Singapore

Corresponding Authors

Fatimah Lateef, FRCS (A&E), MBBS, FAMS (Em Med) Senior Consultant, Department of Emergency Medicine, Singapore General Hospital, Professor, Dukes-NUS Graduate Medical School, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, and Director, SingHealth Duke NUS Institute of Medical Simulation, Singapore

Keywords

Psychological Safety; Emergency Department; Covid-19; Survey Study; Pandemic

Received : March 04, 2022
Published : April 04, 2022

Abstract

The Emergency Department represents a complex healthcare setting for delivery of acute and emergent care, 24 hours a day. We set out to measure the level of psychological safety among emergency department staff during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We have employed Clark TR’s definition of psychological safety, which comes in four stages namely: Inclusivity, Learning Safety, Contributory Safety and Challenger Safety to carry this out through the use of a series of questions. Our team also decided to innovate and add another domain known as Behavioural Safety. This was thus considered as the fifth stage of psychological safety in our survey. As this is the first such survey on psychological safety conducted in our ED, we intended to view these parameters and domains as a baseline, for future studies as well as interventions. Moreover, having been through the Covid-19 pandemic, we do realise there may be some new perspectives, feelings and behaviours, which may have become inculcated by the experience of the staff. We thus felt this would be beneficial in gauging the current state of psychological safety as well as the future directions and trajectory we can plan for our survey results showed that across all the stages of psychological safety in the emergency department, doctors demonstrated a higher level of psychological safety as compared to nurses; with inclusion safety, learning safety and behaviour safety being the highest, whilst challenger safety was the lowest. In addition, there were no significant differences during subgroup analysis on gender and seniority and its impact on psychological safety.