Abstract
BACKGROUND: Patient safety (PS) is one of the essential elements of health care quality and a priority of healthcare systems in most countries. Thus the creation of validated instruments and the implementation of systems that measure patient safety are considered to be of great importance worldwide. AIM: The present paper aims to illustrate the process of linguistic validation, cross-cultural verification and adaptation of the Bulgarian version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (B-HSOPSC) and its test-retest reliability. METHODS: The study design is cross-sectional. The HSOPSC questionnaire consists of 42 questions, grouped in 12 different subscales that measure patient safety culture. Internal con-sistency was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the split-half method were used; the Spear-man-Brown coefficient was calculated. RESULTS: The overall Cronbach's alpha for B-HSOPSC is 0.918. Subscales 7 Staffing and 12 Overall perceptions of safety had the lowest coefficients. The high reliability of the instrument was confirmed by the Split-half method (0.97) and ICC-coefficient (0.95). The lowest values of Spearmen-Broun coefficients were found in items A13 and A14. CONCLUSION: The study offers an analysis of the results of the linguistic validation of the B-HSOPSC and its test-retest reliability. The psychometric characteristics of the questions revealed good validity and reliability, except two questions. In the future, the instrument will be administered to the target population in the main study so that the psychometric properties of the instrument can be verified.