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Are clinical instructors preventing or provoking adverse events involving students: A contemporary issue

Faculty Advisor

Date

2018

Keywords

nursing students, nursing education, clinical education, nursing faculty, patient safety, health care errors

Abstract (summary)

Errors are inevitable. Unfortunately, when errors happen in health care, leading to adverse events, human lives are put at risk. There has been an abundance of international research into adverse events since the landmark report To Err is Human was published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2000, and much has changed in healthcare culture since the recognition that system failures—rather than individual negligence—contribute to most adverse events (Reason, 2000, p. 768). However, studies have focused largely on registered professionals—and even when healthcare students were included, the focus remained on the students themselves, often excluding their instructors. So, what can clinical instructors do to prevent adverse events involving their students, and what might they be doing inadvertently to provoke these events? Certainly, no instructor would like to believe that they contributed to a student’s mistake; yet, so many students and nurses have a story of a “terrible teacher”—one that made them feel unintelligent, incompetent, or downright scared. What is the ultimate role of the clinical instructor in patient safety? This article proposes a framework to begin to understand nursing student error prevention, with the aim to assist clinical instructors, nursing faculty, and nursing leaders in addressing an unrecognized aspect of adverse events.

Publication Information

Christensen, L. (2018). Are clinical instructors preventing or provoking adverse events involving students: A contemporary issue. Nurse Education Today, 70 (November 2018), 121-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2018.08.024

Notes

Item Type

Language

English

Rights

All Rights Reserved