Patient Safety Competencies in Rural ASN Students: an Evidence-based Curricular Innovation

Hospital clinical experiences are important events in prelicensure nursing education. Benefits include the opportunity for students to experience actual nursing responsibilities, immersion into environment, and professional socialization. However, challenges in finding appropriate clinical experiences include competition over clinical sites, decreasing patient acuity, and high student-faculty ratios. Rural schools of nursing have these challenges and those inherent in rural environments such as limited health care access, restricted critical access hospitals, and limited resources. The purpose of this evidence-based practice project was to plan, implement, and evaluate the use of a series of patient care simulations as an educational intervention to improve patient safety competencies while caring for multiple patients in prelicensure students at a remote rural two-year college in the Midwest. The project aimed to answer the PICOT question: In rural ASN prelicensure students, what is the effect of a series of multiple patient simulations as compared to baseline on patient safety competency? The Promoting Action on Research in Health Sciences (PARiHS) framework was used to guide project implementation and evaluation and the Nursing Education Simulation Framework (NESF) was used to guide the simulations. Participants were observed and the data statistically analyzed. There was a decrease in safety errors in observed competencies from 25 errors in 100 behaviors in the first to 12 errors in 100 behaviors in the fourth simulation. Findings support the use of a series of multiple patient simulations in prelicensure nursing education to improve patient safety competency. Incorporating this educational intervention into rural nursing curricula is recommended