Nursing Schools need to establish information systems for nursing security events. This is one of the conclusions reached by Song and Guo (2019) in their study entitled “What influences nursing safety event reporting among nursing interns?: Focus group study.” This study caught our attention, and it has served as a basis for reflecting on the importance of learning and reporting adequately on safety events since the beginning of nursing studies. Training on how to correctly detect and record safety events that affect patients should be included in the teaching programs of the Schools and Faculties of Nursing from the beginning of the learning process of the students. Moreover, we think it is an excellent idea and a scientific contribution of great interest for the field of nurs ...

Healthcare assistants (HCAs) are a longstanding part of the healthcare workforce, particularly at the interface between health and social care. Healthcare assistants have been used in areas where there is pressure to cut costs for example caring for people with complex needs or who are vulnerable. In UK (DH 2012, Francis 2013) and Ireland (Health Service Executive 2016) there have been reports of poor or appalling care being administered by HCAs. Batenburg (2016) explored the HCA workforce across Europe and mapped equivalent roles across the EU, also noting where regulation was in place, with a view to developing a common educational framework. He found that entry requirements, title protection, training duration, regulations and registration differed between member states. However, little ...

 In the Health and Social Care faculty of Saimaa University of Applied Sciences more attention has been paid to practicing multiprofessional co-operation during nursing education. For example, in autumn 2018 a joint multiprofessional simulation training was held with the Accident and Emergency unit of South Karelia Central Hospital and the Social and health care district. The simulation plan was designed by the nursing students of Saimaa University of Applied Sciences as a part of their Bachelor`s  thesis, which they write for the Sharing Learning from Practice to Improve Patient Safety project (SLIPPS). The simulation plan and the simulation itself was supervised by teachers participating in the SLIPPS-project and an anesthesiologist and a traumatology doctor from South Karelia Central Ho ...

In January 1, 2017, a new regulation on management and quality improvement came into force within the Norwegian healthcare service. The regulation is a new and improved version of a previous regulation for the same purpose. The Ministry of Health wishes to focus on some key challenges within the Norwegian healthcare services. Among other things, the Ministry points to the following points where there is a need for improvement. • Clarity associated with responsibility, management and organization • Insufficient systematics to ensure that employees have the necessary professional skills • Challenges in interfaces and transitions • Low degree of implementation of planned measures • Failure to follow up on whether the measures have had the desired effect • A little systematic and anchored work ...

A virtual learning center is an online learning platform that uses computer software to partake in a web-based educational platform. Even though this method of teaching and learning has been accepted with mixed feelings, studies have demonstrated that there is a growing demand for virtual learning centers on a global scale. Designed to address the needs of its users, virtual learning centers have expanded their coverage to serve learners and students in grades K-12 as well as at the university level. There exist a variety of reasons why institutions continually integrate the virtual learning option into their systems. These reasons comprise: virtual learning centers minimize costs by lowering the costs of infrastructure and staff, enable and promote networking of instructions between vario ...

Recently a decree of the Italian Ministry of Health in APRIL 2017 put in place the innovative Law 24/2017 known colloquially as the Gelli Law, which is focused on the safety of care and the occupational accountability of practitioners in health professions. This law underlines the patient’s right to receive safe care, directly drawn from article 32 of the Italian Constitution. The right to safe healthcare should be ensured through instruments of prevention and risk management, together with the appropriate use of the resources available. The law also underlines every single health worker’s duty to contribute to the prevention of risk during the provision of a healthcare service. In this way, all health professionals should be actively responsible for patient safety. With this new law, all ...

Inevitably our professional interests are shaped by the important learning events we experience and one compelling personal experience can have enduring consequences for our careers. My interest in clinical errors began at 7.00am one Sunday morning over 20 years ago. I was coming to the end of my night shift in charge of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) when a cardiac arrest call came from one of the orthopaedic wards. Some minutes later the night sister called me, as the patient who had arrested had very recently been transferred from ICU. When I got to the scene I saw that the patient was indeed a man who had been transferred from ICU the previous day. Two very junior doctors were trying to orally intubate the patient in between efforts to ventilate him with a facemask.  Horrified, I told t ...

A rather frequent event that occurs to in-hospital patients is clinical deterioration, especially briefly following their hospital admission. One of the indicators for patient’s early clinical deterioration is the activation of the Rapid Response Systems within 48 hours of patient’s admission. Based on a recent study conducted in the USA, not even the severity of illness, functional status and comorbidities could be the predictors for such events. However, the same study revealed an interesting finding. “Medical Errors” were the second most alleged cause for patients’ early clinical deterioration (Wang et al., 2017). “Medical Errors” is not a new concept. However, it still is an ongoing problem and requires more attention. Considering the fact that ward nurses are p ...

Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) and Learning & Knowledge Technology (LKT) have brought a social revolution that has pushed to the health context towards a process of continuous innovation. Terms such as e-Health, m-Health, telenursing, telemedicine, Health-apps or even Dr Google are well known among health professionals around the worth (Vizcaya et al., 2017). Mobile technology is gradually being introduced in the field of health care, by allowing communication (effective, asynchronous, etc.), making reference material or information more accessible, acquiring critical thinking skills and even improving patient safety (Casselman, et al., 2017; Roberts and Williams, 2017; Mira et al., 2016; O’Connor and Andrews, 2015; Pucer et al., 2014; Lee Ventola, 2014). Ther ...

Since the 1990s patient safety has been recognised as a major concern within healthcare worldwide, as well as within the UK National Health Service (NHS). There is evidence to suggest that contact with healthcare can cause avoidable harm and unnecessary death. In the literature, these significant safety failings have often been linked to the prevailing organisational culture in the UK NHS. However, the exact nature of this culture and its connection to maintaining patient safety is unclear, despite the reported implementation of strategies to improve patient safety across the healthcare system. As a key staff group within the NHS, nurses have a crucial role to play in protecting the public and keeping them safe. However, the lack of clarity relating to the links between culture and patient ...