Patient Safety Education During Nursing Internship Orientation: A Descriptive Evaluation of Unlinked Pre- and Post-course Surveys

Patient safety education is central to the transition from undergraduate study to nursing internship. However, the available 20-item survey combined self-reports of awareness, knowledge, perceived ability, and confidence and was not validated as a unidimensional measure.

To describe and compare, at the occasion level, nursing interns' responses to an unlinked 20-item patient safety survey administered before and immediately after a structured orientation course.

This descriptive, unlinked pre-course/post-course survey evaluation was conducted at a public faculty of nursing in Egypt from January through February 2024. Records documented 270 interns approached, 268 pre-course questionnaires, and 266 immediate post-course questionnaires. The archived workbook retained 266 record sets at each occasion but no auditable linkage key; consequently, within-person change and paired effects were not estimated. The orientation included seven scheduled 30-minute blocks across three days and was informed by the World Health Organization Patient Safety Curriculum Guide and Quality and Safety Education for Nurses competencies. Analyses summarized each occasion separately. Raw response sums were used only as compact descriptions of heterogeneous items, not as validated scale scores.

Complete 20-item raw response sums were available for 263 pre-course and 262 post-course records. The occasion-specific mean was 77.11 (SD = 9.88) before the course and 86.93 (SD = 10.15) immediately afterward, a marginal mean difference of 9.82 points. Favorable responses (ratings of 4 or 5) represented 70.8% and 90.3% of valid item responses, respectively, a 19.5-percentage-point marginal difference. Maximum total sums occurred in 1.5% of complete pre-course records and 13.4% of complete post-course records; post-course content-group maxima ranged from 18.5% to 26.8%, indicating limited upper-range discrimination.

Post-course responses were more favorable than pre-course responses at the cohort-distribution level. Unverified participant linkage, the uncontrolled design, immediate assessment, uncertain measurement validity, and upper-bound clustering preclude conclusions about individual change, causality, competence, behavior, or patient outcomes.