Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Psychometric Evaluation of the Healthcare Professionals Patient Safety Assessment Curriculum Survey (HPPSACS) for Health Professions Education
This methodological study confirms that the Turkish version of the Healthcare Professionals Patient Safety Assessment Curriculum Survey (HPPSACS) is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing patient safety education among health professions students.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the complex world of modern healthcare, the goal is not just to treat illness, but to do so without causing new harm. This concept, known as patient safety, has evolved from a simple focus on individual doctors or nurses being careful, to a broader understanding that safety depends on the entire system. It involves how teams communicate, how errors are reported without fear, and how the culture of a hospital or school encourages learning from mistakes rather than hiding them. For students training to become doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other health workers, learning these systems is now a critical part of their education. However, educators face a difficult challenge: how do you measure whether a curriculum is actually teaching these complex, system-wide skills? Without a reliable way to ask students what they think and feel about their safety training, schools cannot know if their lessons are working or if they need to change.
To solve this problem, researchers in Türkiye set out to adapt and test a specific survey tool designed to measure these perceptions across many different types of health professions. The tool they chose, originally created in English, asks students about their comfort with safety skills, their confidence in reporting errors, their tendency to deny that errors happen, and their perception of the safety culture around them. The researchers wanted to know if this tool would work just as well in Turkish, and if it could be used to compare students from nursing, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and other fields on the same scale. They gathered a large group of 616 undergraduate students from universities in Istanbul to take the survey. The process began with a careful translation, where bilingual experts translated the questions into Turkish and then back into English to ensure the meaning remained exactly the same. A panel of experts then reviewed the questions to make sure they made sense in the local culture, followed by a small test run to check for clarity.
Once the Turkish version was finalized, the researchers put it to a rigorous test to see if it measured what it was supposed to measure. They analyzed the responses to see if the questions naturally grouped together into the four intended categories, much like how puzzle pieces fit together to form a complete picture. The results showed that the Turkish survey held together perfectly, retaining the original four-part structure without needing to remove or change any questions. The data confirmed that the survey was highly consistent; when students answered the questions, their responses were reliable and stable over time. The researchers also checked that the different parts of the survey were distinct from one another, ensuring that a student's feelings about reporting errors were not simply a reflection of their general attitude toward safety. The statistical evidence was strong, indicating that the tool is valid and reliable for use in Turkish universities.
This study marks a significant step forward because, until now, similar surveys in Türkiye had mostly been tested only on nursing students. By proving that this tool works for students from six different health professions, the researchers have provided educators with a common language to discuss patient safety education. Schools can now use this survey to compare how well different programs are teaching safety, identify where students might feel unprepared, and track improvements over time. The findings suggest that this instrument is ready to be used widely to help shape better, safer healthcare training for the next generation of professionals, ensuring that the focus on preventing harm is woven into the education of every health worker, regardless of their specific field.
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