A SURVEY OF RADIOLOGY TECHNOLOGY STUDENT'S ATTITUDE ON PATIENT SAFETY IN RADIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS OF URMIA'S EDUCATIONAL HOSPITALS

Background & Aims : Paying attention to the patient safety is part of ethical and legal responsibilities of each hospital. Nowadays, radiology departments play a valuable role in diagnosis of diseases by preparing images from different organs. Patient safety should be considered in radiology departments because of using complicated equipments, technologies and applying X-ray to determine disorders and malfunctions. Since knowledge and practice of students as future staff can play a significant role in determining & improving patient safety in radiology departments, evaluating the amount of safety and ethical errors committed in radiology departments should be taken into consideration. The present study intended to determine patient safety based on radiology technology students' point of view. Materials & Methods : The present research is a descriptive and cross sectional study which was done on all of B.S radiology technology students (N= 79) of Urmia University of medical sciences in spring of 2011. The instrument used for data collection was a self-constructed questionnaire consisting of two sections. The first section was about demographic characteristics, and the second section consisted of 25 questions about factors which threaten patient safety by applying universal articles & instructions published on the most common safety error in radiology departments .Students' attitude was evaluated using Likert scale (in a self-administered questionnaire) .Validity and reliability of applied questionnaire was confirmed(Chronbach's alpha=0.75).The obtained data was analyzed using descriptive& inferential statistics and also Spss 19 software. Result : The results of this study showed that: 36.7% of the students did not give any information to the patient for his cooperation during a radiography, 25.3% of them failed to use radiation protection equipment and not collimating radiation field, 22.8% did not get enough information from patient and 17.7% of them did not update personnel's knowledge in radiology department. These were the most prevalent errors respectively .Generally speaking, according to the results obtained from the study, the amount of patient safety from students' point of view in more than half of the cases was about average. %41.8 of students assessed the amount of patient safety as being good and %58.2 of students assessed it as being moderate. Conclusion: According to the results obtained from the present study, the following strategies are suggested to improve patient safety and quality of services: