An Empirical Investigation of Safety Climate in Emergency Medical Technicians in Iran

This paper discusses empirical research aimed at investigating the most important dimensions of safety climate from Emergency Medical technician's perspective. Investigation was conducted through the safety climate questionnaire (SCQ) in Tehran Emergency Organization. After a literature review, a 21-item questionnaire was developed and administered to 600 technicians. In order to indentify the structure of safety climate Factor analysis was used with varimax rotation method using SPSS 17 software. Data on safety climate were collected by completed questionnaire from 266 technicians with a response rate of 44%. Safety climate attributes were conducted to reduce by Factor analysis and identified five critical safety dimensions which together explained 61% of the total variance. One way ANOVA results show that there were no statistically significant differences for characteristics such as age, experience and job category at the 5% significance level. Employees' perceptions on the five safety climate dimensions differ significantly among the four groups on the basis of their factor scores in safety climate dimensions at the p< 0.05 significance level. In order to improve safety climate, based on the study results, more attention should be paid to safety training and management support.