Changes in nursing practice: associations with responses to and coping with errors

Area of Science:

• Nursing Practice
• Patient Safety
• Healthcare Quality Improvement

Background:

• Healthcare professionals experience distress and fear regarding medical errors.
• Errors present opportunities for learning and constructive changes in clinical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate nurses' emotional responses to errors.
• Examine perceived senior staff responses to errors.
• Analyze error-coping strategies and their association with practice changes.

Main Methods:

• Prospective, correlational, multicentre study.
• Data collected from 536 nurses via structured questionnaires.
• Questionnaire content validity was evaluated.

Main Results:

• Positive senior staff responses, accepting error responsibility, and seeking social support predicted constructive practice changes.
• Negative senior staff responses and error escape-avoidance predicted defensive practice changes.

Conclusions:

• Supportive, non-blaming cultures encourage adaptive error-coping strategies, promoting constructive clinical practice changes.
• Senior staff play a crucial role in creating supportive ward climates for learning from errors and improving patient safety.