Development of a Nursing Psychological Safety Assessment Toolkit for Nurse Leaders

Abstract

DNP ProjectIntroduction/Purpose: Assessing psychological safety within a nursing department is critical information for leaders that gives insight into the culture of teamwork and collaboration. Nursing leaders need the ability to assess their team's psychological safety quickly to help understand safety culture. The purpose of this project was to create a toolkit that nursing leaders can easily access to help assess and improve their team's psychological safety. Methods: Nursing leaders at a single community hospital were administered a pre-test regarding their comfort in assessing psychological safety. The nursing leaders then used the psychological safety toolkit to help assess their department and built an action plan to increase psychological safety. A post-test was performed after the toolkit implementation was complete. The data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in scores from the pre-test and the post-test. Results: The results identified improvement in all mean scores of nurse leaders' comfort in understanding psychological safety, confidence in its importance, ability to assess their team, and ability to build an action plan. Inferential statistics showed a statistically significant improvement in scores for leaders' confidence in creating an action plan. Discussion: Building a toolkit for nursing leaders to administer when they assess for psychological safety will allow leaders to obtain real-time information about their team. By guiding them on how to develop action plans to increase psychological safety, they can create high-functioning teams that invest in a culture of safety