Enhancing Patient Safety: Factors Influencing Medical Error Recovery Among Medical-Surgical Nurses

Keeping patients safe is a core nursing duty. The dynamic nature of the healthcare environment requires that nurses practice to the full extent of their education, experience, and role to keep patients safe. Research has focused on error causation rather than error recovery, a process that occurs before patient harm ensues. In addition, little is known about the role nurses play in error recovery. A descriptive cross-sectional, correlational study using a sample of 184 nurses examined relationships between nurse characteristics, organizational factors, and recovery of medical errors among medical-surgical nurses in hospitals. In this article, we provide background information to introduce the concept of error recovery, and present our study aims and methods. Study results suggested that medical-surgical nurses recovered on average 22 medical errors and error recovery was positively associated with education and expertise. The discussion section further considers the important role of medical-surgical nurses and error recovery to enhance patient safety. In conclusion, we suggest that creating a safer healthcare system will depend on the ability of nurses to fully use their education, expertise and role to identify, interrupt, and correct medical errors; thereby, preventing patient harm.