Learning from Errors at Work: A Replication Study in Elder Care Nursing

Abstract

Learning from errors is an important way of learning at work. In this article, we analyse conditions under which elder care nurses use errors as a starting point for the engagement in social learning activities (ESLA) in the form of joint reflection with colleagues on potential causes of errors and ways to prevent them in future. The goal of our study was to investigate whether exploratory findings from an earlier study on hospital nurses’ ESLA (Bauer and Mulder Learning in Health and Social Care 6:121–133, 2011) replicate and generalise to the domain of elder care nursing. For this purpose, we surveyed a sample of N = 180 elder care nurses using vignette-based questionnaires. With these data, we tested a mediation model of nurses’ ESLA suggested by the earlier study. We firstly found a statistically significant indirect effect of error strain on ESLA that is completely mediated by the estimation of an error as relevant for learning (β = .16). Secondly, the perception of a safe social team climate at work has a statistically significant indirect effect on ESLA that is completely mediated by nurses’ tendency to cover up errors (β = .31). These results entirely cross-validate the exploratory findings of Bauer and Mulder (Learning in Health and Social Care 6:121–133, 2011) on hospital nurses’ ESLA and show that they generalise to the domain of elder care nursing.