This study discovered that the underlying safety climate may play a role in how various departments use reporting systems. Investigators used a questionnaire to assess how internal medicine, surgery, and intensive care departments perceived existing safety procedures, safety information flow within the department, and the priorities given to safety overall. These findings were analyzed against the errors reported to each hospital's risk management services. The authors discovered that each department shared different safety perceptions and these differences seemed to explain greater versus less willingness to report treatment errors. The same authors previously described the dimensions of safety climate applied to this study.