Quality And Safety Education For Nurses

In October 2005 the Quality and Safety Education for Nursing program was established. This program is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. QSEN was developed specifically for future nurses to understand and be aware of key challenges such as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are essential to constantly advance the quality and safety of the way healthcare systems work. The goal for QSEN is to reshape the identity of nursing so it includes the recommendations by the Institute of Medicine so there is a commitment to the quality and safety proficiency (Dycus, 2009).

Quality and Safety Education in Nursing (QSEN) was started around 2005 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. QSEN's main goal is to “prepare future nurses with knowledge, skills and attitudes (or KSAs) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare system,” (QSEN, 2017). “Integration of clinical skills with the intellectual capacity to safely manage the complexity of nursing work in key to quality care in a time of diminishing resources,” ( Dolansky, 2013). “It is vital for schools of nursing to meet the needs of today's complex health care systems by including principles of quality and safety throughout the curriculum,” (Lewis, 2016). Within the KSAs are six main categories; patient-centered care, teamwork

In the article “What Do Nurses Really Do?”, Suzanne Gordon explores what nurses truly do. She concludes that nurses “save lives, prevent complications, prevent suffering, and save money” (Gordon 2006). Nurses provide care for their patients in the physical and emotional sense. Emotionally caring for a patient and being sensitive to his or her needs result from interacting with patients while performing the skills and using the knowledge that nurses learned in school. Nurses grow in their skills, knowledge, and attitudes through practice. Quality and safety education for nursing incorporates competencies that all nurses must use in their practice. These nursing competencies include evidence-based nursing practice, quality improvement, safety, teamwork and collaboration, patient-centered care, and informatics.

The overall goal through all phases of The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) is to address the challenge of preparing future nurses with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in which they work. In order to accomplish this goal, six competencies were defined. These competencies from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) are patient centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, informatics and safety. Over a decade has passed since the Institute of Medicine’s reports on the need to improve the American healthcare system. The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses

Over time the health care industry has become more complex. Health care is rapidly evolving and continuing to complicate our delivery of care, which in turn has the same effect on quality of care. This steady evolution and change results in nursing shortages and an increase in the prevalence of errors being made. In hopes of preventing these errors and creating safe and high quality patient care, with the focus on new and improved ways of thinking, The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative was developed. The QSEN focuses on the following competencies: patient-centered care, quality improvement, safety, and teamwork and collaboration. Their initiatives work to prepare and develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are necessary to make improvements in the quality and safety of health care systems (Qsen.org, 2014).

Dolansky and Moore (2013) argued that the development and integration of QSEN competencies into nursing education had not have the outcomes intended. They stated "over a decade has passed since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System" and national initiatives to improve quality, especially QSEN, have been futile in significantly improving quality and safety. "QSEN is a national movement that guides nurses to redesign the "what and how ' they deliver nursing care so that they can ensure high-quality, safe care" (Dolansky & More 2013).

Keeping patients safe is essential in today’s health care system, but patient safety events that violate that safety are increasing each year. It was only recently, that the focus on patient safety was reinforced by a report prepared by Institute of medicine (IOM) entitled ” To err is human, building a safer health system”(Wakefield & Iliffe,2002).This report found that approx-imately 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors and that the majority was preventable. Deaths due to medical errors exceed deaths due to many other causes such as like HIV infections, breast cancer and even traffic accidents (Wakefield & Iliffe, 2002). After this IOM reports, President Clinton established quality interagency

QSEN is quality and safety in nursing. It is designed for nurses to continuously improve the quality and safety of patient care delivered. Interdisciplinary friction can threaten the delivery of quality patient care. In addition to ineffective communication and teamwork which can be very detrimental and result in adverse effects in patient care. These adverse reactions lead to the need for incident reports to be filled out, however, some reports end up incomplete or overlooked. The implementation of new skills can change the outcomes in patient safety.

According to the AHRQ: National Healthcare Quality Report (2009), the goal of quality of health is to help people stay healthy, learn to live with a disability or chronic disease, recuperate from an illness, and deal with dying and death. However, instead of delivering health care services that are safe, patient centered, equitable, and timely. Many patients do not receive needed care. When care is received many times it is unsafe or too late

The organization that she currently works for has a goal to become a high-reliability organization within the next few years. “A High Reliability Organization (HRO) is one that has been successful in avoiding disasters despite being in a high risk field where accidents can be expected due to complexity,” (Jacobson, 2015). Health care is constantly changing. Common concerns to all healthcare sectors that impact the quality of care is increasing costs and limited resources, system inefficiencies, increasing complexity, and an ever-expanding evidence gap (Weberg, 2012).

The National Database for Nursing Quality Indicators is an organization that allows hospitals to compare nursing quality of national, state, and regional for similar units and hospitals (Cherry & Jacob, 2017). This organization uses criteria used to grade and improve quality such as patient falls, use of physical restraints, nosocomial infections, nursing care hours provided per patient day, and nurse satisfaction surveys (Cherry & Jacob, 2017). The Quality and Safety Education for Education was established to educate registered nurses to constantly improve the safety and quality in the facilities they work (Cherry & Jacob,

There are 440,000 people a year that die from a preventable variety of mistakes that are made in hospitals, which comes out to a little over 1,000 deaths a day, and is the number three cause of death behind cancer, and heart disease (hospitalsafetyscore). According to a group that rates hospitals named The Leapfrog Group a nonprofit watchdog group that grades hospitals for safety, (leapfrog) a majority of these deaths are very avoidable and are most of the time simple mistakes. Errors in Hospitals are a broad issue that gets hundreds of thousands of people killed every year; for the most part, they are preventable and are caused by overtesting, overdiagnosis, overtreatment, non-reporting, and lack of oversight, though there are ways to prevent

The quality and safety education for nurses, or for short QSEN, is a project that addresses nurses with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to continuously improve safety and quality of healthcare. QSEN’s vision is to inspire healthcare professionals to put quality and safety as vital value to their work. QSEN includes 6 core competencies; patient- centered care, Teamwork and collaboration, evidence- based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics. Nurses use QSEN competencies throughout their practice, especially during medication passes. QSEN prevents medication errors by identifying issues involved with medication passes and using technology.

The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project began in 2005, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Its overall goal throughout its development has been to acknowledge and confront the challenge of ensuring that future nurses are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to maintain and improve the quality and safety of healthcare systems (Case Western Reserve University [CWRU], 2014a). The project was composed of three phases.

Focusing her attention on nursing leaders, Dolansky and Moore wrote a thorough article exploring how effective the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative has been since its inception in 2005. The authors further examined the importance of expanding the QSEN framework from an individual approach to a systems approach. They described how expanding the QSEN framework will ultimately allow for an acceleration of quality and safety in both the individual and the healthcare environment. Accomplishing this goal means recognizing patterns that occur between a patient’s behavior and their environment (social, cultural, and so forth). Dolansky and Moore did an outstanding job of supporting their arguments by providing historical