Nursing Students’ Awareness of Nursing Malpractice

Abstract

Recently, the number of mistakes made by nurse practitioners has gone up in the field of healthcare. This is caused by various problems, such as lack of nurses, too much work undertaken by each nurse, and a failure to meet the ever-changing demands and expectations of nurses’ roles. This was a descriptive study designed to explore the current nursing students‘ awareness of job-related mistakes and errors, thereby providing essential data to develop a program to imrpove their performance and the sense of legal responsibilities. The 131questionnaires completed by anonymous nursing students was analyzed by Krippendorff’s process. There were total 130 statements with 36 meaningful statements, and 2 domains, 8 themes and 21 sub-themes were delineated. The 2 domains were Cause of Errors and Result of Errors. The Cause of Errors included 6 themes: Insufficient nursing knowledge, Procedural problems, Decisional problems, Absence of respect, Unawareness of legal responsibilities and Unethical actions. The Result of Errors included two themes: Inflicting damage and Causing pain and suffering. This study focuses on awareness of nursing-related errors, but additional studies on demand of nursing error-related education are much needed.