Educational Needs of Patient Safety Care Among Nurses in General Hospitals

Education is one of the effective strategies to improve patient safety care in healthcare. For better education, it is essential to identify areas where intervention is needed.

This study was designed to analyze nurses' educational needs by comparing the perceived importance and performance of patient safety care in general hospitals in Korea.

A cross-sectional study of 296 nurses in Korea was conducted between November and December 2022. The importance-performance analysis (IPA), Borich rank assessment, and the locus for focus (LF) model were used to compare nurses' perceived importance and performance of each aspect of patient safety care.

Overall, the mean performance score of patient safety care (4.47 ± 0.52) was significantly lower than the mean importance score (4.59 ± 0.51) (t = 5.05, P < .001). As determined using IPA and the LF model, the top-priority educational needs were related to proper hand hygiene practice and side effect monitoring after medication administration.

This study provided areas where general hospital nurses need additional education to ensure patient safety. The results suggest the need for developing systematic education programs to enhance nurses' patient safety competencies, which could contribute to improving the quality of healthcare services.