The missing link: dedicated patient safety education within top-ranked US nursing school curricula

Ten years after To Err Is Human found that perhaps as many as 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors, 9 of the top 10 nursing schools in the 2007 US News and World Report rankings failed to require an expressly dedicated patient safety component (DPSC) within their curricula. Curricula were evaluated for the presence of a DPSC; 3 courses were selected from 2 top 10 school curricula to serve as DPSC criteria. For each reviewed curriculum, an average score was calculated representing the ratio of the number of programs requiring a DPSC, to the total number of reviewed programs. Results indicate the average score for these top 10 schools to be a scant 0.004. The top-ranked school was found to have 2 nursing specialty curriculum catalogs, totaling 174 course descriptions, entirely devoid of the words "safety," "quality," and "error." Ironically, the school curriculum providing 2 of the 3 DPSC criteria failed to require its own DPSCs in all 31 reviewed nursing programs.