[Nursing, patient safety and the acquisition of nursing-sensitive outcomes in German hospitals].

As the largest occupational group in healthcare, nurses continuously work in very close contact to patients and nursing home residents. No other professionals in the healthcare sector are involved in or responsible for so many different processes. They play a key role in, on the one hand, identifying and potentially avoiding errors and, on the other hand, in causing them. Traditionally, error handling in Germany is still strongly influenced by pointing a finger to and tabooing problematic behaviour. Structured systems for detecting errors and error reports can help to improve risk management in nursing. There is a need to develop fundamental structures like national indicators of nursing quality for systematic and valid error measurements and the structured collection of nursing-sensitive outcomes at a national level.