Missed nursing care in emergency departments: A scoping review

BackgroundPatient safety is a global health priority. Errors of omission, such as missed nursing care in hospitals, are frequent and may lead to adverse events. Emergency departments (ED) are especially vulnerable to patient safety errors, and the significance missed nursing care has in this context is not as well known as in other contexts.AimThe aim of this scoping review was to summarize and disseminate research about missed nursing care in the context of EDs.MethodA scoping review following the framework suggested by Arksey and O’Malley was used to (1) identify the research question; (2) identify relevant studies; (3) select studies; (4) chart the data; (5) collate, summarize, and report the results; and (6) consultation.ResultsIn total, 20 themes were derived from the 55 included studies. Missed or delayed assessments or other fundamental care were examples of missed nursing care characteristics. EDs not staffed or dimensioned in relation to the patient load were identified as a cause of missed nursing care in most included studies. Clinical deteriorations and medication errors were described in the included studies in relation to patient safety and quality of care deficiencies. Registered nurses also expressed that missed nursing care was undignified and unsafe.ConclusionThe findings from this scoping review indicate that patients’ fundamental needs are not met in the ED, mainly because of the patient load and how the ED is designed. According to registered nurses, missed nursing care is perceived as undignified and unsafe.     

What we know and what they do: nursing students' experiences of improvement knowledge in clinical practice

Nations around the world face mounting problems in health care, including rising costs, challenges to accessing services, and wide variations in safety and quality. Several reports and surveys have clearly demonstrated that adverse events and errors pose serious threats to patient safety. It has become obvious that future health professionals will need to address such problems in the quality of patient care. This article discuss a research study examining improvement knowledge in clinical practice as experienced by nursing students with respect to a patient-centred perspective, knowledge of health-care processes, the handling of adverse events, cross-professional collaboration, and the development of new knowledge. Six focus groups were conducted, comprising a total of 27 second-year students. The resulting discourses were recorded, coded and analysed. The findings indicate a deficiency in improvement knowledge in clinical practice, and a gap between what students learn about patient care and what they observe. In addition the findings suggest that there is a need to change the culture in health care and health professional education, and to develop learning models that encourage reflection, openness, and scrutiny of underlying individual and organizational values and assumptions in health care.     

Patient safety ethics and human error management in ED contexts: Part I: Development of the global patient safety movement

In recent years there has been increasing recognition internationally that health care is not as safe as it ought to be and that patient safety outcomes need to be improved. To this end patient safety has become the focus of a world-wide endeavour aimed at reducing the incidence and impact of preventable human errors and related adverse events in health care domains. The emergency department has been identified as a significant site of preventable human errors and adverse events in the health care system, raising important questions about the nature of human error management and patient safety ethics in rapidly changing environments. In this article (the first of a two-part discussion on the subject) an overview of the incidence and impact of preventable adverse events in ED contexts is explored. The development of a ‘culture of safety’ in other hazardous industries and the ‘lessons learned’ and applied to the health care industry are also briefly examined. In a second article (to be presented as Part II), some of the ethical tensions that have arisen in the context of implementing patient safety processes and their possible implications for ED contexts are explored.     

Improving patient safety and incident reporting

Patient safety is currently an international priority in health care, as it is widely accepted that the quality of healthcare provision, in terms of reducing errors and other forms of unnecessary patient harm, needs to be improved significantly. This article describes the work and position of the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) in NHS-funded care. It outlines the contribution made by two nurses who, as clinical specialty advisers (CSAs) in the organisation, are charged with helping to ensure that nursing issues are considered as an integral part of developing solutions to patient safety issues.     

患者的安全共同的责任

患者安全是护理质量中基本和重要的部分。然而，国际卫生保健系统是易于出现过失的，并且对患者的安全性护理是有害的，是基本系统缺陷所造成的。大量的利益相关者（社会大众、患者、护士、护理教育者、管理者和研究者、医师、政府和立法机关、职业协会和委任机构）对促进患者安全出院及无伤害发生是负有责任的。本文讨论了护理缺陷中相关者对患者安全的职责与特殊功能及继续接受和促进安全护理。     

Patient safety: a shared responsibility

Patient safety is an essential and vital component of quality nursing care. However, the nation's health care system is prone to errors, and can be detrimental to safe patient care, as a result of basic systems flaws. A variety of stakeholders (society in general; patients; individual nurses; nursing educators, administrators, and researchers; physicians; governments and legislative bodies; professional associations; and accrediting agencies) are responsible for ensuring that patient care is safely delivered and that no harm occurs to patients. The responsibility of these stakeholders in addressing patient safety in the context of a nursing shortage is discussed, along with specific actions they have taken, and can continue to take, to promote safe care.     

Communication skills and error in the intensive care unit

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Poor communication in critical care teams has been frequently shown as a contributing factor to adverse events. There is now a strong emphasis on identifying the communication skills that can contribute to, or protect against, preventable medical errors. This review considers communication research recently conducted in the intensive care unit and other acute domains. RECENT FINDINGS: Error studies in the intensive care unit have shown good communication to be crucial for ensuring patient safety. Interventions to improve communication in the intensive care unit have resulted in reduced reports of adverse events, and simulated emergency scenarios have shown effective communication to be correlated with improved technical performance. In other medical domains where communication is crucial for safety, the relationship between communication skills and error has been examined more closely, with highly detailed teamwork assessment tools being developed. SUMMARY: Critical care teams perform many activities where effective communication is crucial for ensuring patient safety and reducing susceptibility to error. To develop valid team training and assessment tools for improving teamwork in the intensive care unit there is a requirement to better understand and identify the specific communication skills important for safety during the provision of intensive care medicine.     

Opioids,Iatrogenic Harm and Disclosure of Medical Error

The safety of patients in U.S. hospitals is a serious problem, with adverse events because of medical error affecting a significant proportion of hospitalized patients. Patients at the end of life are particularly vulnerable and are at risk of potential adverse events. This article presents a case in which opioids were rapidly titrated to neurotoxic doses in a patient who was terminally extubated. The patient was profoundly sedated and was noted to have Cheyne-Stokes breathing. The possibility of opioid-related iatrogenic harm is raised, and a discussion of what counts as medical error in these circumstances is explored. Palliative care specialists have a unique responsibility to provide guidance and establish a standard of care that clinicians should adhere to. Prevention of harm in dying patients should be a priority in the hospital setting.     

The role of nursing surveillance in keeping patients safe

The most frequently reported threats to patient safety take place in hospitals, with the majority of errors and adverse events occurring during the course of routine care. Nursing surveillance has been proposed as an intervention to reduce adverse patient events. This article presents an overview and analysis of nursing surveillance with emphasis on the defining characteristics, antecedents, and consequences.     

Interventions related to patient safety.

Patient safety is a growing priority in today's increasingly complex, highly technologic, and business-oriented health care system. This increasing emphasis is being fueled by issues such as cost containment, risk management, quality assurance, health care consumer activism, and legal accountability for practice. In such an environment, it is important that nursing be able to quantify and communicate what it does to promote and maintain patient safety. A standardized language of patient safety interventions provides nursing with the tool to do this. It provides a common language to use when dealing with patient safety issues in the practice, education, research, and administrative arenas. It also allows nurses to package and market the "product" of nursing care to health care consumers, other health care professionals, hospital administrators, and politicians, all of whom share an interest in ensuring that patient safety is maintained and promoted in the most comprehensive yet cost-efficient manner possible.     

Disclosing errors and adverse events in the intensive care unit

OBJECTIVE: To review the issue of disclosing errors in care and adverse events that have caused harm to patients in critical care. DESIGN: Review the scope of the problem, the definitions of errors and adverse events, and the benefits and problems of disclosing errors and adverse events and provide an approach by which to have these difficult discussions. SETTING: Medical center. PATIENTS: Critically ill patients and their families. INTERVENTIONS: Applying a systematic framework for disclosing errors and adverse events to affected patients and their families. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Several national organizations mandate that physicians discuss errors in care and adverse events that have caused harm with affected patients, but failure to do so is a common problem in critical care as surveys of intensivists indicate that, although most believe that errors should be disclosed, few routinely do so. The likelihood of an adverse event is increased in intensive care units because of the nature of critical care. Not all errors or adverse events require disclosure. There are ethical, financial, legal, systems, and personal benefits to disclosing errors, and disclosure discussions should address common patient concerns. CONCLUSIONS: Failure to disclose errors and adverse events in critical care is an important and common problem. There are numerous reasons why errors and adverse events should be disclosed, and use of a standard framework for doing so will facilitate the process.     

JCI标准在血液净化护理管理中的实践

目的:探讨JCI标准对血液净化护理管理的促进作用。方法:采用"以人为本"的人力资源管理,加强"以患者为中心"的安全管理、医院感染管理,实施"以患者舒适"为目标的优质护理等,持续提高血液净化室的护理质量。结果:JCI标准的实施对血液净化室护理质量提升起到了良好的促进作用,保证了患者的安全,提高了患者满意度,有效控制了护理不良事件和医源性感染的发生。结论:JCI标准指导下的血液净化室护理管理有利于维护患者安全和提高护理质量,体现了以患者为中心的护理理念,值得进一步推广和应用。     

护理安全管理现状与对策研究进展

从护理安全管理机构、护理安全(不良)事件报告系统、护理差错的分析系统、护理安全管理质量评价体系、安全管理屏障等方面介绍了国内外的护理安全管理及对策研究进展.     

Enhancing patient safety: The importance of direct supervision for avoiding medication errors and near misses by undergraduate nursing students

Reid‐Searl K, Moxham L, Happell B. International Journal of Nursing Practice 2010; 16 : 225–232
Enhancing patient safety: The importance of direct supervision for avoiding medication errors and near misses by undergraduate nursing students Medication errors have been the focus of considerable research attention in nursing; however, the extent to which nursing students might contribute to errors has not been researched. Using a grounded theory approach, in‐depth semi‐structured interviews were conducted with undergraduate nursing students based in a university in Queensland to explore their experiences of administering medication in the clinical setting. Almost a third of the participants reported making an actual medication error or a near miss. Where medication errors occurred, participants described not receiving direct and appropriate supervision by a registered nurse. Medication errors by nursing students have the potential to impact significantly on patient safety, quality of health care, and on nursing students' perceptions of their professional competence. Ensuring direct supervision is provided at all times must become an urgent priority for undergraduate nursing education.     

Patient safety: do nursing and medical curricula address this theme?

In this literature review, we examine to what extent patient safety is addressed within medical and nursing curricula. Patient safety is the foundation of healthcare practice and education both in the UK and internationally. Recent research and policy initiatives have highlighted this issue. The paper highlights the significance of this topic as an aspect of study in its own right by examining not only the fiscal but also the human costs such events invite. In the United Kingdom patient safety issues feature prominently in the (Department of Health, 2000a. An organisation with a memory. The report of an expert group on learning from adverse events. The Stationery Office, London, Department of Health, 2000b. Handling complaints: monitoring the NHS complaints procedures (England, Financial year 1998-99). The Stationery Office, London.) policy documentation but this is not reflected within the formal curricula guidelines issued by the NMC and GMC. Yet if healthcare educational curricula were to recognise the value of learning from errors, such events could become part of a wider educational resource enabling both students and facilitators to prevent threats to patient safety. For this reason, the paper attempts to articulate why patient safety should be afforded greater prominence within medical and nursing curricula. We argue that learning how to manage errors effectively would enable trainee practitioners to improve patient care, reduce the burden on an overstretched health care system and engage in dynamic as opposed to defensive practice.     

Patient safety: where is nursing education?

Patient safety is receiving unprecedented attention among clinicians, researchers, and managers in health care systems. In particular, the focus is on the magnitude of systems-based errors and the urgency to identify and prevent these errors. In this new era of patient safety, attending to errors, adverse events, and near misses warrants consideration of both active (individual) and latent (system) errors. However, it is the exclusive focus on individual errors, and not system errors, that is of concern regarding nursing education and patient safety. Educators are encouraged to engage in a culture shift whereby student error is considered from an education systems perspective. Educators and schools are challenged to look within and systematically review how program structures and processes may be contributing to student error and undermining patient safety. Under the rubric of patient safety, the authors also encourage educators to address discontinuities between the educational and practice sectors.     

Incident Monitoring in Emergency Departments An Australian Model

The specialty-based study of incidents, adverse events, and errors in medicine has largely occurred in anesthesia and to a lesser extent in intensive care and psychiatry. Few studies have specifically addressed the problem in emergency medicine (EM). Because of the significant risks, the resulting adverse outcome, and the high degree of preventability of errors occurring in the emergency department (ED), it is essential that an incident monitoring system be part of the ED's risk management program. The combination of time pressure, uncertainty, complexity, and workload means the ED is a high-risk environment. The delivery of high-quality emergency care is dependent on having an effective patient processing system in place and, because EM is a "systems-dependent" specialty, the environment lends itself to improvements to the system (re-engineering) to improve the safety of the environment given that the majority of errors in the ED are probably the result of failures of the system. This paper describes an existing incident monitoring system that has recently been adopted by six EDs in Australia. It was developed as a result of a similar successful program in anesthesia, and funded by the Federal Department of Health of Australia. Incorporating incident monitoring and analysis to identify causative factors of incidents and the subsequent implementation of corrective strategies as part of the ED risk management program may result in improvement in the quality of care through a reduction in the frequency of incidents.     

Repeat medication errors in nursing homes: Contributing factors and their association with patient harm

Background: Medication errors are highly prevalent in long-term care facilities and are responsible for preventable injury. Repeat medication errors, or identical events occurring multiple times in the same patient, may be particularly preventable.Objectives: This study assessed the factors that contribute to repeat medication errors and the association between repeat medication errors and patient harm.Methods: In this cross-sectional analysis, medication error reports submitted by licensed nursing homes to North Carolina's Medication Error Quality Initiative-Individual Error Web-based incident reporting system were analyzed for fiscal years 2006–2008. When reporting errors, the sites were asked whether the event was identically repeated within the same patient. Repeat medication errors were defined as identical events in terms of patient characteristics, drug involved, error type, potential cause, phase of the medication care process, and personnel involved. Repeat errors were compared with nonrepeat errors. Multivariate logistic regression was used to explore whether certain patient or error characteristics were related to a higher likelihood of repeat errors, and a similar analysis was used to explore whether repeat errors were related to patient harm.Results: Of the total 15,037 errors reported by 294 unique nursing homes, 5615 (37.3%) were repeated one or more times. Among the repeat errors, the associated event within each error was repeated a mean (SD) of 10.7 (14.3) times. Wrong dosage (65.1% [3654/5615]) and wrong administration (10.2% [571/5615]) were the most frequent repeated events. In multivariate analysis, repeat errors occurred less frequently among younger residents (aged <75 years) than among older residents (aged ≥75 years) (odds ratio [OR] = 0.85; 95% CI, 0.79–0.93) and among residents able to direct their own care compared with cognitively impaired residents (OR = 0.87; 95% CI, 0.81–0.95). Patient harm was reported in only 1.2% (68/5615) of repeat errors and 0.6% (55/9422) of non-repeat errors. A multivariate analysis of patient harm found that repeat errors were more likely to be harmful than were nonrepeat errors (OR = 2.11; 95% CI, 1.43–3.11).Conclusions: Repeat medication errors in nursing homes are a common occurrence and have greater odds of being associated with harm than do nonrepeat errors. Future patient-safety research should focus on factors related to repeat errors.     

Reporting near-miss events in nursing homes

Since the Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human was published in 1999, improving patient safety has become a major initiative for nurses working in all care settings. Nursing homes are a fertile environment for both a high frequency of adverse events to occur and a high number of institutional barriers to reporting them. This article outlines the barriers to reporting adverse events in nursing homes and provides support for why reporting near-miss events can serve as a means of reducing these barriers. It also provides recommendations and specific strategies for how to implement near-miss reporting systems in nursing homes such as policy changes, supportive leadership, and educating nurses about near-miss events. Further nursing research in this evolving area of patient safety is warranted.