QSEN Competencies In Nursing

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QSEN Competency of Safety A major push for the improvement of quality and safety outcomes was in 2000 when the Institute of Medicine published, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. In 2003 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) laid out the six core competencies for healthcare workers. In 2007, the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project redefined the competencies to fit the care of nurses (Jones, 2013). Two of the competencies laid out in this project are quality and safety. These are often clumped together, but are in fact two separate competencies. I will be laying out what is safety and how it differs from quality. How a culture of safety needs to be a system approach and not just an individual approach. Lastly, discussing …show more content…

There is much overlap when discussing quality and safety in nursing, but it is important to realize that both have their own skills and knowledge essential to the competency. Quality is measuring the rendering of a specific process or action and comparing the data to benchmarks. If the standards are not met then quality improvements are implemented in the hopes of meeting those standards. Were safety is the proactive action of preventing mistakes from occurring, such as knowing a patient is at risk for following and taking precautions such as assisting the patient during ambulation’s. Safety is looking at the environment around you for potential areas of hazard and using critical thinking to make changes for the better of you, co-workers, and patients (Sherwood, …show more content…

Along with how the culture of safety influences changes in the system. In this scenario, a RN mistakenly administers an incorrect dose of a medication to an infant. When the mistake was discovered, it was reported an investigation began to determine how this occurred. The investigation team not only investigated the administering nurse, but also the pharmacy, the unit in which the mistake happened, the process in which medication is administered, and the purchasing department. The report found that there were multiple breakdowns in the system. The child was given an adult dose rather than the child’s dose. The child and adult’s dose came in almost identical vials, only varying by the dosage written on the bottle. The vials were also stored in adjacent bins making identification difficult if