Self-reported confidence in patient safety competencies among Chinese nursing students: a multi-site cross-sectional survey

Abstract

Background: Nursing interns are an important backup force for nursing professionals, so efforts to strengthen their patient safety (PS) competencies are a major priority. To do so requires assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese nursing students' PS competence and identifying the influencing factors. Methods: This was a multi-site, cross-sectional, web-based study that was carried out between September 2018 and January 2019. A national online survey was completed by 732 Chinese undergraduate nursing students. Our primary outcome factor was the Health Professional Education in Patient Safety Survey score. We also collected socio-demographic and clinical practice-related characteristics as independent variables. Multiple stepwise linear regression was performed to identify predictors of PS competence. Results: Chinese undergraduate nursing students were fairly confident in their clinical safety skills but less confident in what they learned about sociocultural or context-dependent aspects of PS and speaking up about PS, including effective communication and understanding human and environmental factors. Less than half of the students felt that they could approach someone engaging in unsafe practice and were reluctant to voice concern about adverse events. We observed significant differences in PS competence between students from different regions, across different PS learning styles (self-study and classroom theoretical study), with different self-assessed PS competence levels, and with experiences of adverse events (p < 0.05). These factors accounted for almost 15% of the total variance in PS competence scores (adjusted R 2 = 0.15, p = 0.00). Conclusions: The results of this study provide a better understanding of PS competence among final-year nursing students in China. Our findings may help nursing educators or healthcare organizations to cultivate and improve PS competence by establishing documented policies or by improving the efficacy of intervention.

The knowledge about patient safety among undergraduate nurse students in Cyprus and Greece: a comparative study

“…In thıs study, overall, students reported that they were more confident in their knowledge about patıent safety gained in the classroom setting than in the clinical setting. These findings are similar to some studies [37,38,44,46,61,65,66], although other studies reported mixed results, with reported clinical scores being higher than the class scores in more than half of the dimensions [9,45,65]. Classroom ıs perceived as a safe environment of learning about working in multi-professional teams, understanding the system-based nature of patient safety problems [50] and being more confıdent to speak up [66,67].…”

“…Students valued learning about patient safety on the technical aspects higher than the sociocultural aspects in both settings. The findings are consensus to other studies [44][45][46]. That indicates that a system-based approach is not realised by the students during their education [42,51], as they are not engaged in learning the organisational strategies and systems in the clinical setting [39,42].…”

“…Earlier evidence indicated that students felt more confident in technical aspects than the sociocultural aspects of patient safety [9,[44][45][46][47]. For example, students reported less knowledge regarding teamwork issues, especially during their clinical placements [35,46], although they valued teamwork ıncludıng patient participation in health care planning [48]. However, this evidence derived mainly from Canada, USA and Australia and partly from Europe (e.g.…”

Nurses’ competency in Saudi Arabian healthcare context: A cross‐sectional correlational study

“…Findings corroborate a study of about patient safety competencies of undergraduate nurses in 7 Chinese administrative provincial regions (Huang et al, 2020). In another research, it affirmed a previous study of in Thailand about self-rated nursing competency.…”

Perception, Knowledge and Attitude Towards Patient Safety Among Nursing Students in Private College

“…Similar to another study conducted by Nabilou et al, (2015), the nursing and midwifery students dedicated more knowledge to patient safety than medical students. The latest study also revealed that nursing students in China gain more knowledge in the clinical setting and manage gaps in their knowledge (Huang et al, 2020). This condition will become more efficient by fostering collaboration between nursing faculty and clinical nurses to teach patient safety content to close the knowledge gap in theory and practice (Huang et al, 2020).…”