Registered nurses' judgments of the classification and risk level of patient care errors.

As frontline clinicians, nurses play a critical role in mitigating patient harm, recovery from health care errors, and overall improvement of patient safety. This cross-sectional study asked nurse respondents to make judgments about the classification and severity of errors in 4 clinical vignettes. Our results showed that agreement about error classification and associated risk among registered nurses is less than optimal. Further research is needed to advance our understanding of how nurses working in complex patient care situations can improve their ability to recognize subtle cues to facilitate early recognition of potential errors.