10561
Teaching Students How to Evaluate and Implement Quality and Safety in Patient Care From Fundamentals to Graduation
Nursing educators face multiple obstacles in effectively integrating quality and safety initiates into an often overburdened curriculum. The goal of best educational practices should be to seamlessly thread these principles throughout the entire curriculum in all student encounters.
Significance:
There are many thousands of preventable patient deaths every year across numerous facilities and practice areas that are caused by provider error. The evidence has shown little improvement in the past ten years in this preventable death rate. These principles are vital in nursing education.
Strategy and Implementation:
The baccalaureate nursing program at the University of Virginia's College at Wise has started the process of incorporating the Quality & Safety Education in Nursing (QSEN) principles into classes, laboratories, and clinicals. Students are introduced to QSEN principles starting at the beginning of the semester in the Fundamentals class, laboratory, and clinical courses. Students in the senior Leadership nursing courses continue to utilize the QSEN principles in classroom and clinical. Students in the Leadership class were required to: do both a paper and group project/presentation during the semester about one of the quality and safety indicators related to nursing practice and each group presented their research findings to the class. The Leadership students also were required to keep a journal for clinical experiences in health care agencies and identify any quality and safety issues found in clinical for each day. Students completed instructor led root cause analysis of case studies.
Evaluation:
Journaling gave students the opportunity to identify quality and safety issues they found in clinical encounters and the chance to discuss these as part of classroom interaction. These students began to identify quality and safety issues in care plans without being prompted by the instructor.
Implications for Practice:
When students graduate from a nursing program, they should have the skills to talk about safety and quality, identify problems, and begin the process of solving problems regarding patient care at the bedside and throughout the organization. This can be accomplished if integrated in the curriculum.