Health-care providers’ knowledge and compliance with patient safety incidents reporting at two specialist hospitals in Ghana

Purpose This study aims to examine the relationship between Ghanaian health-care providers’ knowledge of patient safety and their compliance with incident reporting, using two specialist hospitals in the Greater Accra Region as a standard. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional study design with a quantitative approach was used in this study. The data was collected with a structured questionnaire from 312 health-care providers selected from the two specialist hospitals via consecutive sampling. Descriptive statistics, linear regression and One-Way ANOVA were used to analyse the data using the Stata 16 statistical software package. The level of significance was accepted at p < 0.05 at a 95% confidence interval. Findings The level of compliance with patient safety incident reporting was moderately high at 69.3% (95% CI = [67.3; 71.4]). The level of knowledge of patient safety was also high at 80.6% (95% CI= [78.9; 82.3]). The health-care provider’s profession, educational level and length of service at the facilities studied were also found to be associated with incident reporting. Originality/value The study concludes that there is no significant difference in the level of knowledge of patient safety and incident reporting. There is also no significant difference in compliance with incident reporting among respondents at the two specialist hospitals. Adopting the theory of causal chain and high-reliability theory can improve patient safety knowledge and reporting compliance. A dual-theory approach facilitates triangulation and underscores the importance of integrating patient safety training into both educational curricula and professional practice environments. This means that there is a need to develop policies to improve patient safety incident reporting to enhance quality of care in health-care institutions. Thus, the study recommends targeted measures to bridge the gap between health-care workers’ intention to report patient safety incidents and their actual reporting behaviour.