The characteristics of patient safety culture in Japan, Taiwan and the United States

Table 1 Materials and response rates

	Japan	Taiwan	U.S.
Recruiting strategy
Hospitals	Voluntary participation^§	Stratified sampling & Voluntary participation	Voluntary participation^§
Respondents in the hospital	All healthcare workers	A part of the healthcare workers^†	All healthcare workers or a part of the healthcare workers^††
Period of survey	Jan 2009–Jan 2010	Jul 2007–Aug 2008	Jan 2006–Jun 2009
Number of participated hospitals
<300 beds	3	23	702
300–499 beds	7	13	117
≥500 beds	4	38	65
Total	14	74	884
Number of the subjects
Distribution	10,466	11,692	827,424
Recovery	8,192 (78.3%)	10,289 (88.0%)	337,862 (40.8%)
Valid data^‡	6,963 (66.5%)	10,019 (85.7%)	291,341 (35.2%)

^§Hospitals were not selected randomly and participation was voluntary.
^¶Ten hospitals participated voluntarily and 64 were selected randomly.
^†Depending on the number of beds in each hospital, 10–300 questionnaires were distributed.
^††The questionnaires were distributed to all staff at 637 hospitals and to some staff at 247 hospitals.
^‡Incomplete questionnaires were excluded from the analysis, and included surveys with less than an entire section completed, surveys with fewer than half of the total items completed, or surveys with identical responses to every item.

ISSN: 1472-6963