Improving Patient Safety: Using Bruner's Theory of Constructivism to Develop an Innovative Root Cause Analysis Virtual Simulation for Graduate Nursing Students.

Abstract

Medical errors and near-miss events continue to impact hundreds of thousands of people annually. Given this fact, it is imperative that graduate students entering a career in patient safety are confident and competent in conducting root cause analyses so that they can fix broken systems and improve patient outcomes. Using Bruner's theory of constructivism as a framework, a virtual simulation was developed to provide online graduate nursing students an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge of root cause analyses in a virtual real-world online simulation.