Nursing Education for the Patient Safety

Patient Safety and Nursing Education

Patient Safety In Nursing Practices,Importance of Patient Safety In Nursing Education,Concerns of Nursing Educator to Educate for Patient Safety,Aspects of Patient Safety In Nursing Education.

Patient Safety In Nursing Practices

    Patient safety is an obligatory component of quality health service planning, delivery, and evaluation. The promotion and preservation of individuals' physiological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual integrity as recipients of health services are representative of patient safety. Establishing and maintaining safety for diverse patient populations: across multiple health care contexts involves a complex interplay of purposeful individual and collective actions of multiple stakeholders (Benner, Malloch, & Sheets, 2010). 

    Key stakeholders are situated within educational institutions, health care agencies, professional organizations, and regulatory bodies including administrators, decision makers, researchers, educators, clinicians, health care students, patients, and families.

Importance of Patient Safety In Nursing Education

    Patient safety is a foundational underpinning to the education of all nurses regardless of their domain of practice. To optimize patient safety, nursing students and practicing nurses must not only develop but they I must also sustain current safety competencies through formalized prelicensure learning experiences and ongoing continuing education initiatives. Across learning contexts, a number of traditional and technologically mediated educational strategies: have been identified as effective for the development of patient safety knowledge, skills, and attitudes. 

    Educators, students, and nurses, within a program overtly committed to patient safety, engage in deep learning as they critically examine not only the practice of individual practitioners, but the broader system context in which patient safety is promoted, preserved, and, at times , understood. In addition to promoting learning, educators are responsible for the detection of circumstances where students' knowledge, skills, or attitudes may jeopardize patient safety. 

    Due diligence, guided by professional and educational standards, necessitates the presence of sound evaluative mechanisms, reporting: structures, and policies for remediation or failure Collectively, stakeholders must be vigilant and communicate individually and system threats on early identification in order to preserve patient safety ( World Health Organization, 2011).

Concerns of Nursing Educator to Educate for Patient Safety

    Nurse educators' responsibilities for patient safety are guided by an understanding of safety curricula content, teaching and evaluation strategies, and contemporary evidence. Programs have been developed to support practitioners' capacity to fulfill the patient safety mandate. Exemplars of safety curricula include the Multi Professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide (World Health Organization, 2011) and the Patient Safety Curriculum (National Patient Safety Foundation, 2014). 

    More specific to the development of nursing students' knowledge, skills, and attitudes for patient safety is the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Initiative (Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Institute, 2014). Common content within such programs includes roles and ethical obligations of individual practitioners' evidence informed knowledge; patient centered care; clinical reasoning and health informatics; communication among health care providers; systems theory; and risk detection, management, and recovery.

    Content associated with patient safety competencies can be learned through small group activities, case studies, and interactive lectures. Such strategies engage students and explore real-world complexities, which can positively influence patient safety outcomes (Chenot & Daniel, 2010; Forbes & Hickey, 2009). The use of clinical simulations advances opportunities to refine safety competencies within a circumscribed low-risk scenario. Critical reflection during and following a simulated experience allows students to identify their role and the broader system factors that support or threaten patient safety (Benner et al., 2010; Blum & Parcells, 2012). 

    According to Reason, Carthey, & de Leval (2001), there is a heightened risk to patient safety when individual practitioners are blamed for errors, the existence of systemic errors causing weaknesses are denied, and a patient-centered approach is not present. As such, open discussion about factors contributing to system and practice breakdowns increases awareness of potential threats to patient safety in clinical practice (Palmieri, DeLucia, Peterson, Ott, & Green, 2008). Nurse educators must not only promote patient safety, but also evaluate the acquisition and application of safety competencies. 

    This necessitates sound and timely evaluative assessments, in compliance with professional practice standards and explicit program expectations (Tanicala, Scheffer, & Roberts, 2011). To this end, tools to measure patient safety knowledge, skills, and attitudes are emerging (Schnall et al., 2008). Educators fulfill a role in supporting patient safety through remediation and mitigation of at risk situations (Rutkowski, 2007).

    The direct measurement of patient safety is potentially elusive and, at present, imprecise. Patient safety is typically measured by the incidence, prevalence, and circumstances surrounding adverse health care events. These include medications errors, nosocomial infections, patient injuries, complaints, and mortality (DiCuccio, 2014). Strategic compilation of findings from discrete databases could contribute to the creation of a historical and contextually informed repository of patient safety violations.

Aspects of Patient Safety In Nursing Education

    Nurse educators must develop, implement, evaluate, and explicitly communicate the intricacies of evidence-informed safety curricula with their stakeholders. In doing so, the cognitive, moral, ethical, and practical components of patient safety become overt understood, and expected, regardless of the level of nursing preparation or practice setting Classroom, laboratory, and clinical nurse educators must be constantly vigilant for threats to patient safety and prepared to intervene.

    Nurse educators must ensure the presence of clearly articulated program policies, informed by professional standards, and comply with such policies to mitigate risks to patient safety. Within such a milieu, the emphasis is on risk reduction/prevention, remediation, and correction, as opposed to individual blame and punishment. In addition, it is recommended that nurse educators contribute to the development of a patient safety database that would allow others to learn from emerging patterns of adverse events. Finally, there is a need for further theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between patient safety curricula and patient outcomes.