Aim: To provide sufficient information about the Manchester Patient Safety Framework (MaPSaF) to allow healthcare professionals to assess its potential usefulness.

Background: The assessment of safety culture is an important aspect of risk management, and one in which there is increasing interest among healthcare organizations. Manchester Patient Safety Framework offers a theory-based framework for assessing safety culture, designed specifically for use in the NHS.

Conclusions: The framework covers multiple dimensions of safety culture, and five levels of safety culture development. This allows the generation of a profile of an organization's safety culture in terms of areas of relative strength and challenge, which can be used to identify focus issues for change and improvement.

Implications for nursing management: Manchester Patient Safety Framework provides a useful method for engaging healthcare professionals in assessing and improving the safety culture in their organization, as part of a programme of risk management.