Quality and safety education in nursing: More than new wine in old skins

Abstract

The current national focus on enhancing patient safety resonates with nurses because high quality, safe nursing care has been the raison d’être for the nursing profession. Nursing educators, organizations, and regulators have worked together for the past century to insure this one, essential outcome. Undergirding the profession’s enduring value for quality care is a growing cadre of well-educated clinicians, advanced practice nurses, nurse scientists, and a maturing discipline that is supported by well-established schools of nursing. Since registered nurses constitute 40% of the US health professions workforce, the sheer size of this one profession would predict a strong, secure safety net for consumers of health care. How could it be otherwise? While nurses and other health professionals entered the 21st century armed with life-saving technologies, silently accompanying those same technologies was an unrecognized seamlessness of care that was essential to their safe use. 1 Wachter R.M. The end of the beginning Patient safety five years after “To err is human.”. Health Affairs. 2004; 23 (Available at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w4.534/DC1. Accessed on October 23, 2006): 534-545 Google Scholar No longer could the safe practice of any one provider guarantee that patients would receive either safe or effective health care because of the many providers, and many hand-offs involved in any one case. As hospitals became the environment for sicker and older patients, the safe margin of error for any one patient dramatically narrowed. L. Antoinette Bargagliotti is President, National League for Nursing (NLN). Jeanette Lancaster is President, American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN).