Background: Professional autonomy is a crucial component of the nursing profession. It enables nurses to make timely decisions at the patient’s bedside. The competency of human resources, especially nurses, is essential in maintaining patient safety and ensuring high-quality services. This study investigates nurses’ professional autonomy and its association with patient safety competency.
Methods: This descriptive-correlational study was conducted on 200 nurses in educational-therapeutic hospitals affiliated with Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz City, Iran, in 2021. They were recruited utilizing stratified random sampling. Data collection tools comprised a demographic questionnaire, professional autonomy questionnaire, and patient safety competency self-evaluation questionnaire. The obtained data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, and median), the Mann-Whitney U test, the Kruskal-Wallis test, the Kendall Tau, and Spearman non-parametric correlation coefficients in SPSS software, version 26. P<0.05 was considered significant.
Results: Based on the study of the 200 nurses participating, 120 (60%) experienced a high level of professional autonomy, and 150 (75.0%) reported a moderate level of patient safety competence. There was a strong correlation between the nurses’ professional autonomy and their patient safety competence (P<0.001).
Conclusion: According to the findings, promotion of professional autonomy is directly related to patient safety competence in nurses, which in turn improves the quality of care.   It is recommended to adopt appropriate strategies and necessary policies by managers to improve the professional autonomy of nurses.