Patient Safety Concerns

This study aims to test whether a brief behavioural intervention can help healthcare professionals raise and respond to patient safety concerns in their work. Healthcare professionals are often encouraged to speak up about safety risks, but barriers such as time pressure, uncertainty, and workplace culture can make this difficult. Participants will complete an online questionnaire about their experiences of patient safety risks and how often they raise concerns. They will then be randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group will complete a short planning exercise ("if-then" plans) designed to help them act when they notice safety concerns, while the other group will not receive this exercise. Participants will be invited to complete follow-up questionnaires at approximately one month and six months to assess how often they have raised or responded to safety concerns since taking part.

The aim of the present research is to test the effectiveness of an implementation intention-based intervention for promoting the raising of safety concerns by patients in healthcare settings. Each participant will be randomly allocated to one of two conditions: (1) a control condition, and (2) an intervention condition, in which participants form multiple implementation intentions (i.e. "if-then" plans) using a structured online interface. The main outcome measure will be the frequency with which participants report raising safety concerns in healthcare settings over a 12-month follow-up period.