Abstract

Session presented on Friday, July 24, 2015:

Nursing, historically, has been interested in safe patient care in the clinical and educational settings. Previous studies show that 1 in 10 patients experience an adverse event due to medical error. Clinical policies and work place training are not sufficient to prevent errors. It is essential that nursing curriculums at all levels explicitly include safety discussion throughout the curriculum and that nursing students be assessed in the clinical setting for safety-related behaviors and attitudes. Assessment of such behaviors and attitudes requires a consistent approach with a valid instrument. Currently, no universally-accepted, standardized assessment tool for clinical performance in nursing students is available. The Clinical Performance Evaluation Tool (CPET) is one of the few clinical performance tools available. This tool is aligned with the Quality and Safety Education in Nursing (QSEN) standards. The evidence shows that best practice in selecting clinical performance instruments should begin with alignment of the outcomes and assessment criteria with the current curriculum. Without a standardized tool, the alignment process must be done by individual programs. This report discusses the process adopted in one baccalaureate nursing program to align clinical performance with the QSEN competencies. The initial step towards changing the curriculum included an assessment of current clinical evaluation tools using the CPET tool based on the QSEN competencies. This assessment compared existing clinical evaluations methods among courses and determined the depth or frequency of each QSEN competency in each of the 12 courses with clinical components in the BS curriculum. An expert panel review using accepted definitions and discussion to reach consensus was the procedure used in the study. Results: The two reviewers with experience in nursing education arrived at a 91% consensus on the presence of the QSEN competencies and the frequency in each course. All but one course matched QSEN competencies in part or whole. Evaluation of the frequencies showed a strong patient-centered care focus present throughout the courses while quality improvement and informatics were least present. The next step in the process is for faculty to determine through value clarification if the frequency of each QSEN competency is appropriate for the desired outcomes of the program. Supervising faculty must modify the exemplars used in the assessment tool to describe the valued behaviors under each competency for the program. This project has limited generalizability since only one baccalaureate program was included in this project; however the approach can be considered as a possible option for baccalaureate and non-baccalaureate programs in evaluating safe clinical performance utilizing best-practice guidelines.

Author Details

Kathie Ingram, RN, APHN-BC; Suzanne Robben Brown, PT

Sigma Membership

Gamma Alpha

Type

Poster

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

N/A

Research Approach

N/A

Keywords:

Clinical Competencies, Evaluation of Safety, Safe Clinical Performance

Conference Name

26th International Nursing Research Congress

Conference Host

Sigma Theta Tau International

Conference Location

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Conference Year

2015

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Share

COinS
 

Evaluating safe clinical performance in nursing education

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Session presented on Friday, July 24, 2015:

Nursing, historically, has been interested in safe patient care in the clinical and educational settings. Previous studies show that 1 in 10 patients experience an adverse event due to medical error. Clinical policies and work place training are not sufficient to prevent errors. It is essential that nursing curriculums at all levels explicitly include safety discussion throughout the curriculum and that nursing students be assessed in the clinical setting for safety-related behaviors and attitudes. Assessment of such behaviors and attitudes requires a consistent approach with a valid instrument. Currently, no universally-accepted, standardized assessment tool for clinical performance in nursing students is available. The Clinical Performance Evaluation Tool (CPET) is one of the few clinical performance tools available. This tool is aligned with the Quality and Safety Education in Nursing (QSEN) standards. The evidence shows that best practice in selecting clinical performance instruments should begin with alignment of the outcomes and assessment criteria with the current curriculum. Without a standardized tool, the alignment process must be done by individual programs. This report discusses the process adopted in one baccalaureate nursing program to align clinical performance with the QSEN competencies. The initial step towards changing the curriculum included an assessment of current clinical evaluation tools using the CPET tool based on the QSEN competencies. This assessment compared existing clinical evaluations methods among courses and determined the depth or frequency of each QSEN competency in each of the 12 courses with clinical components in the BS curriculum. An expert panel review using accepted definitions and discussion to reach consensus was the procedure used in the study. Results: The two reviewers with experience in nursing education arrived at a 91% consensus on the presence of the QSEN competencies and the frequency in each course. All but one course matched QSEN competencies in part or whole. Evaluation of the frequencies showed a strong patient-centered care focus present throughout the courses while quality improvement and informatics were least present. The next step in the process is for faculty to determine through value clarification if the frequency of each QSEN competency is appropriate for the desired outcomes of the program. Supervising faculty must modify the exemplars used in the assessment tool to describe the valued behaviors under each competency for the program. This project has limited generalizability since only one baccalaureate program was included in this project; however the approach can be considered as a possible option for baccalaureate and non-baccalaureate programs in evaluating safe clinical performance utilizing best-practice guidelines.