74 Saudi nursing students’ attitudes towards patient safety and the influencing factors: a quantitative and qualitative study at the college of nursing – jeddah

Abstract

Background Patient safety becomes a challenging discipline in educational institutions and hospitals. As future nurses, it is expected that nursing students have sufficient knowledge and inspirational attitude towards promoting patient safety. The aim of this study was to assess the attitudes of Saudi nursing students towards patient safety at the College of Nursing - Jeddah, and to identify the factors that influence their attitudes towards patient safety. Methods Mixed methods research was done using a concurrent triangulation design. An Attitude Towards Patient Safety Questionnaire was developed by the researchers and given to all nursing students (n=296) who enrolled in the academic year 2017–2018 to collect the quantitative data, while a qualitative investigation guided by in-depth interview was done with a purposive sample of 14 nursing students to identify factors influencing their attitudes towards patient safety. Appropriate statistical analysis was applied while qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. Results The present study concluded that Saudi nursing students manifested high and positive attitudes towards patient safety and indicated that their attitudes were not affected by the academic level or learning experience. ‘Teaching patient safety issues’ scored as the highest dimension compared with ‘error disclosure and management dimensions’, which rated as the lowest dimension of students’ attitude. Many factors extracted from qualitative content analysis seem to influence students’ attitudes towards patient safety, identified as facilitators or barriers and thematically categorized as ‘patient factors’, ‘staff factors’, and ‘work environment factors’, with 25 subfactors under these themes. Conclusion Nursing students should be supported by adequate training about safety measures to enhance their safety attitude, knowledge, and practice. Error reporting and disclosure culture should be a norm in nursing education and the healthcare environment. Therefore, students should participate in the process of error analysis and management with the provision of adequate clinical supervision. Various teaching-learning strategies including traditional teaching and problem-based learning should be integrated as instructional strategies by nurse educators for enhancing nursing students’ problem- solving and critical thinking and to bridge the identified theory-practice gap.