Nursing students' perspectives and suggestions on patient safety—Implications for developing the nursing education curriculum in Iran

Abstract

Background: Medication errors complicate up to half of inpatient stays and some have very serious consequences. To our knowledge, this is the first qualitative study of Iranian nursing students' perspectives of medication errors.Objectives: To describe nursing students' perspectives of the causes of medication errors.Design: Four focus groups were held with 24 nursing students from 4 different academic semesters in the nursing school in Tehran, between November 2011 and November 2012.Using a qualitative descriptive design, themes and subthemes were identified by content analysis.Results: Two main themes emerged from the data: "under-developed caring skills in medication management" and "unfinished learning of safe medication management", which was subdivided into "drifting between being worried and being careful", and "contextualising pharmacology education". All respondents felt that their education programmes were leaving them vulnerable to "drug errors" and cited incidents where patient safety had been jeopardised. Conclusion:Nursing curricula need to increase investment in medicines management. If nursing students are to become competent, skilful and safe practitioners, their learning will require extensive support from their academic institutions and clinical mentors.

Iranian Nurses’ Perspective of Barriers to Patient Education in Intensive Care Unit: A Qualitative Study

“…In a study it has been reported that the most cited barriers from the perspectives of nurses include lack of appropriate educational environments (97.5%), shortages of nursing personnel (95.5%), funding deficits (92.5%), and lack of enough attention and support from management to patient education (82.1%), perspectives of administrators to teach patients (82.1%) (29). In other studies, these barriers have been reported alike (1,2,5,28).…”

“…Various studies have shown significant relationships between educational degrees and employment duration of nurses with patients' mortality rates, disability rates, and unexpected events, incidence of infection, bed sores, and length of hospital stay, incidence of complications, patient dissatisfaction and the amount of considering ethical issues (18,(26)(27)(28). It is essential for nurses to be efficiently provided with the principles and techniques of teaching and learning processes for their educational role (28).…”

“…The main barriers to implement patient education are reported as lack of time and manpower resources, inadequate knowledge and skills of nurses about methods and principles of patient education, inadequate supervision on patient education process, and lack of incentives for nurses in implementing patient education programs, lack of facilities and equipments in wards, lack of perceived necessity for patient education in management, lack of timely payments to nurses, inappropriate cultural issues in both nurses and patients, inappropriate physical condition in patients for education (1,2,5,14,16). Barriers to patient education are factors that limit the ability of nurse or medical team members (28).…”

The Effectiveness of a Course on Patient Safety Management on the Patient Safety Competencies by Final Year Bachelor of Nursing Students in the Netherlands

“…Embedding patient safety competencies in the current curriculum can be done by development of a particular course on patient safety wherein the emphasis is on the organization system and human factors, effective teamwork and optimal communication [6,10,23,24,[26][27][28]. Moreover, to appeal for a 'blame and shame free' culture it is essential to learn nursing students how to handle and prevent adverse events and to interference in reporting errors and coping with the fear of legal prosecution [3,6,9].…”

“…Patient safety is a part of daily practice, however, is not yet included in all nursing education curricula [3]. This results in a lack of knowledge and skills concerning patient safety [28]. Several authors state that nursing curricula therefore should be adjusted [10,26,27].…”