Nursing and Patient Safety
Nursing and Patient Safety
Every day in Canada, patients’ safety is threatened by potential harms that nurses have the professional and ethical responsibility to minimize or prevent.
These safety concerns can be referred to as incidents, adverse events, unsafe acts, errors, and harms. Nurses play a significant role in improving patient safety and minimizing patient harm. The purpose of this paper is to identify patient safety concerns and strategize ways that nurses, health care teams, and health care organizations can mitigate these concerns.
Learning Objectives:
• Examine the significance of patient safety principles in nursing practice
• Analyze the implications of high risk behaviours and unsafe practices in health care
• Identify strategies to ensure that health care providers are better positioned to provide safe, effective, efficient, and quality care
• Compose an academic paper with critical reasoning and application of relevant nursing concepts, principles, and professional standards
Instructions:
1. Compose an academic paper that addresses the following:
• Identify a practice error/issue/concern that you have encountered or observed. This could be related to your role as a student nurse, patient, family member,
or member of a health care team.
o Clearly state the problem or event
o Define the problem as a pattern and not just as an isolated event
• Conduct a root cause analysis to determine why this issue may have occurred
o Ask “why” at least five times until you reach the root cause of the problem
• Identify three strategies that nurses can implement to solve the problem or subsequent changes that can be made in their daily nursing practice to prevent
practice errors and increase patient safety
2. Demonstrate critical reasoning by providing rationale and evidence to support your thoughts
• Utilize the resources found in Canvas or external resources
• Examples from professional practice may be provided as long as privacy and confidentiality are maintained (patient, health care team, and organization) to
strengthen thoughts
Format:
Page limit: Maximum 4 pages (excluding title page and refence pages)
APA (7th edition) needs to be followed:
1. Title page
2. No abstract needed
3. Headings are necessary
4. Double-spaced, 1-inch margin on all sides
5. In-text citation is necessary for all paraphrased sentences and direct quotations from sources (only common knowledge/information is allowed to not be
cited)
6. Reference page with appropriate citations of resources used
Helpful Tips:
• Start with brainstorming ideas, thoughts, references, and creating a structured outline
• Introduction should include a thesis statement
• Refrain from using “I” statements, academic papers should be written using a third-person point of view
• Concise and succinct points with strong evidence is highly encouraged instead of run-on sentences
• Conclusion should be a summary of main body of your essay (do not introduce new thoughts or evidence in this section)
• Review basic referencing and formatting guidelines for APA 7th edition
Grading: 50 points
The rubric for this assignment can be found on Canvas.