Integrating the Safer Together National Action Plan to Improve Nurse-Led Models Focused on Patient Safety

Patient safety remains an elusive goal for health care systems despite 2 decades of reports, strategies, tools, and revamped health professions education. These actions alone have lowered many targeted areas of preventable harm, particularly hospital-acquired conditions, yet evidence indicates better outcomes depend on "total system" approaches that embed patient safety in the core of care delivery. The first national patient safety plan, Safer Together: A National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety from the Institute for Health Care Improvement, presents 4 recommendations to achieve total system safety. For decades, the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) competencies and the American Nurses Credentialing Center Magnet Recognition Program guided nursing care to ensure safe and high-quality care to pursue nursing excellence. By intertwining with Safer Together, the 3 re-envision a nursing practice model ensuring safe quality patient care. This paper describes integrating the 4 pillars defined by Safer Together into a nursing model with the Magnet Framework fueled by a nursing workforce grounded in the QSEN competencies. Nurses are in frontline positions for leading a total systems safety approach but need guidance for integrating these recommendations into effective professional practice models that define values, structures, and processes for delivering safe quality care.