Influence of psychosocial safety climate and work engagement on safety workaround among nurses in Malaysian public hospitals

It is imperative for the healthcare industry to reduce errors, enhance patient care, and boost workaround effectiveness. However, Failure of safety workaround prevents the achievement of these goals in hospitals by causing employee time wastage, delayed patient care, and low care quality. Safety workarounds are a lack of information, supplies, equipment, or labour that hinder caregivers from providing adequate healthcare services. To improve hospitals’ performance, frontline employees are vital in identifying safety workaround and eliminating their underlying causes. Therefore, through the theoretical lens of the job demand-resource, conservation of resource, and social exchange theories, this study sought to assess the interrelationships among nurses’ psychosocial safety and work engagement on safety workaround in Malaysian public hospitals. The quantitative method was adapted in this study, under which survey data was collected from 559 nurses working in public hospitals in the state of Perak, Malaysia. The participants were chosen based on two-stage cluster sampling. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) analysis of the data revealed that nurses’ work engagement significantly enhances their safety workaround, but psychosocial safety climate does not directly affect safety workaround. Nonetheless, psychosocial safety climate was found to impact safety workaround through the significant mediating role of work engagement. These findings extend the understanding of safety workaround among nurses, offering theoretical and practical implications to researchers and practitioners in the healthcare sector.

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