Establishing a culture of perinatal safety in a community hospital

While unsafe behavior of frontline hospital staff, primarily physicians and nurses, is sometimes the proximal cause of adverse events, the critical importance of system‐wide, hospital organizational factors is now being acknowledged(1,2). These organizational factors create the “safety culture” that influences the occurrence of these proximal failures.(3) The concept of safety culture originated in high‐reliability organization theory, which was largely developed by a group of social scientists at the University of California at Berkeley who studied high‐risk organizations that have achieved very low accident and error rates, for example, aircraft carrier flight decks, nuclear power plants and air‐traffic control systems.(4–6) Safety culture refers to the enduring and shared beliefs and practices of organization members regarding the organization's willingness to detect and learn from errors.(7)