Patient safety climate was measured with the 9-item Safety Organizing Scale (SOS) which captured registered nurses’ engagement in safety behaviours and practices at the unit level.

RESULTS: A total of 35 Swiss hospitals participated in the study. Of the 120 eligible units included in

the analysis, only on 33 units (27.5%) did at least 60% of the nurses report a positive patient safety climate. A majority of nurses (51.2-63.4%, DZNeP n = 1,564) reported that they were “”consistently engaged”" in only three of the nine measured patient safety behaviours. Our multilevel regression analyses revealed both significant between-unit and between-hospital variability. From our three variables of interest (hospital type, unit type and language regions) only language regions was consistently related to nurse-reported patient safety climate. Nurses in the German-speaking region reported a more positive patient safety climate than nurses in the French-and Italian-speaking CT99021 inhibitor language regions.

CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study suggest a need to improve the patient safety climate on many units in Swiss hospitals. Leaders in hospitals should strengthen the patient safety climate at unit level by implementing methods, such as root cause analysis or patient safety

leadership walk rounds, to improve individual and team skills and redesign work processes. The impact of these efforts should be measured by periodically assessing the patient safety climate

with the SOS.”
“During the last years, femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy (fsTRS) has Entinostat become an important new tool to investigate low energy excitations in strongly correlated systems. By studying energy relaxation pathways linking various degrees of freedom (e.g., electrons, spin, or lattice), the interaction strengths between different subsystems can be deduced. Here we report on yet another application of fsTRS, where the technique is used to unambiguously determine the nature of the ground state in granular thin films of a prototype charge density wave system blue bronze, K0.3MoO3. These, potassium blue bronze, films, obtained for the first time ever, have been prepared by pulsed laser deposition and investigated by various standard characterization methods. While the results of all used methods indicate that the thin films consist of nanometer grains of K0.3MoO3, it is only the non-destructive fsTRS that demonstrates the charge density wave nature of the ground state. Furthermore, the comparison of the fsTRS data obtained in thin films and in single crystals shows the reduction of the charge density wave transition temperature and of the photoinduced signal strength in granular thin films in respect to single crystals, which is attributed to the granularity and crystal growth morphology. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.