Safety Culture Survey & Analysis
Let the Center for Patient Safety be a part of your patient safety culture improvement journey
The CPS Advantage
The Center for Patient Safety has developed a robust and flexible culture evaluation process that includes survey administration with pre- and post-survey support to strengthen the progress toward positive culture change. Each phase of our service includes self-guided components, but we encourage you to harness the expertise of our survey team through available one-on-one discussions.
Our process allows you to choose from hundreds of combinations to create a survey as unique as your organization. Our standard services include proven methods to achieve effective results. Whatever your needs, the patient safety and survey experts at the Center for Patient Safety have you covered.
For two decades, the Center for Patient Safety has been a dedicated non-profit resource for advancing patient safety culture, offering support to healthcare providers and their patients. We hold our client partnerships in the highest regard. Our survey services include the following:
- High quality and affordable. We combine continuous improvement strategies with our clients' feedback to provide a cost-effective service that promotes participation.
- Our team is your team. Our team has been where you are. We’ve worked in healthcare and have decades of expert culture change management experience.
- We are accessible to you! We work alongside you throughout the process to provide inspiration and ideas supporting your unique setting. Your team is available to you by direct phone and email.
- No need to learn new software or become a data analyst. We do the survey and analysis for you. If you don’t receive everything you need to make strong, informed decisions, tell us. We will provide additional reports at no extra cost.
- We’re flexible because we know you can’t always be. Your days are unpredictable, so we’re prepared to support you through any emergent work needs. We make adjustments and schedule changes as your needs require. No questions, no extra costs.
We win together! Many survey vendors only provide a survey tool, instructions, and analytic software. We want you to be successful through sustainable change that reduces patient and provider harm, so we work closely to identify what you need most while we take care of the rest.
- We are a trusted vendor. CPS has been administering surveys for more than 15 years. We can help you shift from another vendor or guide you through the process if this is your first time. CPS has submitted data to the AHRQ National Compare Database for more than ten years and, therefore, is a vendor on the AHRQ list of external entities administering the SOPS®.
- Patient safety is all we do! We provide many safety culture improvement services; however, each is designed to support our mission of reducing preventable harm.
Who CPS Works With
100s of hospitals

1000s of others
What CPS survey clients like most
- Easy-to-read reports
- Identification of priority items
- Executive-level reports
- Historical data trending
- Culture planning and change support
Whether you need to meet regulatory requirements or you are striving to create culture change on your journey to becoming highly reliable, CPS provides you with meaningful analysis and dedicated and experienced culture change experts to help you meet your goals!

No other survey vendor can match our services
CPS survey services are unmatched because our focus is on your success. Our feedback reports are industry-leading and our customer service is top-rated.
100% Satisfaction
Our clients love us and we love them, too! CPS earned 100% satisfaction for customer service, detail of reports, and post-survey support*.
100% Flexibility
What CPS Clients Say


What Surveys are Available
With seven surveys and a library of additional questions to choose from, we'll help you ask your employees the most meaningful questions.
- Hospital Survey on Patient Safety® from AHRQ
- Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety® from AHRQ
- Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety® from AHRQ
- Ambulatory Surgery Center Survey on Patient Safety® from AHRQ
- Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety® from AHRQ
- Home Health and Hospice Patient Safety Culture Survey fro the Center for Patient Safety
- Emergency Medical Services Safety Culture Survey (Air/Ground) from the Center for Patient Safety

What to Expect
Your survey will be designed around your unique needs and expectations. You can plan for about 4 weeks of Planning time with the CPS team, 4 weeks of Monitoring, and about 4 weeks for CPS to prepare all feedback reports and analysis. Your PostSurvey work will include improvement planning and change support.
Planning (PreSurvey)
- Contract
- Project meetings
- Homework
- Communication plan
- Customizations
- Accuracy review
Monitoring (During)
- Monitor response rates
- Take action to address low response
Insights (PostSurvey)
- CPS validates the results
- CPS prepares reports and analysis
- Meet with CPS to review results
- Meet with culture improvement expert
- Next steps: Action planning
CPS Standard Services Include
- Planning guide and marketing tools
- Personalized survey planning calls with your CPS Team
- Presurvey self-assessment
- One-on-one discussion with CPS culture improvement expert
- Department list customization
- Access to CPS Question Library
- Custom link with multi-device recognition (mobile, desktop)
- Anonymous survey collection
- Access to your 'Live' response rates
- CPS' thorough approach to data validation
- Historical data accepted via Excel or CSV
- CPS' distinctive feedback reports
- Narrative summary report
- Side-by-side department results
- Ability to evaluate responses of those with patient interaction
- Benchmarks available by discipline, region, size, etc
- Culture improvement resources provided
- Action planning and implementation guidance provided
- Ongoing support through follow-up calls, resources, webinars, and more
- Submission to National Compare Database, if requested
Frequently Asked Questions
- General distribution: CPS provides a hyperlink to your custom survey. You can distribute the link via email, display it on posters, or post it to your organization's intranet site. Anonymity is supported.
- Direct Email distribution: CPS will email the survey link directly to your employees with custom messaging. CPS will track responses and remind your staff when they haven't completed the survey. Anonymity is supported.
An additional option is paper distribution. If interested, discuss with the CPS team.
Best practice is to survey annually around the same time each year with a well-designed process for reviewing employee feedback and developing and completing action plans. For further guidance:
- AHRQ recommends administering a safety culture survey every 12-18 months.
- The Joint Commission and LeapFrog recommend annual culture measurement.
- The latest CMS Patient Safety Structural Measure states annually, or every other year with a pulse survey in between. Ask CPS about pulse surveying between surveys.
IT needs are, overall, minimal but necessary. Depending upon how you would like CPS to distribute the survey, there will be a few recommendations to ensure staff has access to the survey. We'll work with you and your IT team to ensure functionality before the survey starts.
CPS recommends a minimum of 4 weeks to prepare and market the survey; then 30 days for the survey to be open to employees; and another 30 days for the CPS team to validate the responses, prepare the feedback reports, and analyze your results. Large and diverse organizations should plan for longer prep time.
The cost is usually much more affordable than people think! As a nonprofit organization, CPS is committed to keeping costs of services low in order to encourage participation. Service fees are used to offset costs incurred and further support our process improvement efforts and service enhancements.
No organization is the same, so our pricing is different for every organization, too. Ask us for a proposal and we'll create a custom estimate just for you. We look forward to hearing from you!
Yes, you can add questions to any of the core safety culture surveys using the CPS Question Library. We'll create a survey for you that digs into your most pressing concerns while maintaining the integrity of available benchmarks. Available CPS Supplemental Question sets have been developed by well-respected educational institutions and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and include:
- Employee Engagement
- Workload and Burnout
- Just Culture
- Second Victim
- AHRQ Workforce Safety
- AHRQ Value and Efficiency
- AHRQ Health Information Technology
- and more!
Looking to create and add questions of your own? Contact CPS for more information.
Strong survey prep work will result in a higher response rate, which means more valid results; and we want your results to tell the most accurate story about your organization. We'll work with you from beginning to end to ensure you reach your response rate goal.
If something unpredictable arises that impacts your survey response, we'll work with you!
Each survey is available in Spanish and many are available in other languages as well. All aggregated feedback reports are provided in English. Ask us about additional languages!
The CPS team knows how important confidentiality and security are to you and your healthcare organization. Your survey and the data collection will occur through a secure link (https://) that is unique to you. All surveys are created for multi-device compatibility and secure response collection. Reports are distributed through a secure Microsoft Sharepoint site. While we encourage anonymity of all responses and protect your data at all times, CPS will provide you with your raw data at your request. We treat your data like you own it - because you do.
Once your survey is complete, the real work begins! CPS will work closely with you to ensure you understand how to interpret the unique data in your reports. Every survey response is a powerful message from your employees to your leaders and is an important part of the analysis process. Our patient safety experts will personally guide you through report interpretation, comment evaluation, and action planning. You’ll be matched with a CPS patient safety expert that has experience with your healthcare organization’s disciplines. You’ll be given plenty of opportunities to ask questions and request additional support.
You'll have a team of dedicated patient safety and survey experts. Your Survey Manager is an expert at survey planning and delivery. Your Culture Improvement Expert has decades of hands-on Quality, Safety, Risk and culture change experience to share tips, guide and support you. Your Survey Data Manager will work with you to explore survey inputs and your required outputs, ensuring alignment of the vital areas.
Want to learn more?
Schedule a meeting with one of our experts to ask questions, explore and discover more about how the culture survey experience offered by the Center for Patient Safety can support your organization.
