State of Healthcare Safety 2026

Safety is healthcare’s most sacred promise—but sustaining high reliability requires aligned leadership, strong learning systems, and workforce trust.

“State of Healthcare Safety 2026,” a Press Ganey Signature Report, draws on data from 1.3M employees, 23.5M patients, and 7.1M safety events to examine where safety performance is strengthening, where it remains fragile, and what leadership actions will accelerate progress.

Insights from “State of Healthcare Safety 2026” include:

• Safety culture is rebounding—but recovery is uneven. Nearly half (46.6%) of employees still report low perceptions of safety culture, with variation by role and shift.Social capital drives performance. High-trust, high-teamwork organizations are 50–80% more likely to outperform on key safety outcomes.
• Safety suffers when a single organization operates as three hospitals under one roof. When safety culture and patient experience vary across days, nights, and weekends, inconsistency becomes risk—leading to more safety events and patients feeling less safe.
• Reporting culture predicts results. Facilities that report events at expected or higher rates are over 8x as likely to lead on core safety culture metrics.
• Reported assaults on nurses continue to rise—and those on the night shift bear the brunt of it. Employees who experience violence from patients or families report lower engagement and weaker perceptions of safety culture across every domain.

Get the report to explore how safety culture, workforce experience, patient perception, and clinical outcomes intersect—and what distinguishes top-performing organizations from the rest.