The influence of adverse events on the quality of nursing care and patients’ safety

Introduction: High quality of medical services is essential to proper healthcare functioning and to achieve aims. High quality of nursing care should have the same characteristics as the whole healthcare system. Although current healthcare systems focus on best quality medical services, the number of adverse events is increasing. It sometimes happens that a patient suffers injuries not due to his/her illness, but because of poorly organised healthcare.

Aim of the research: To assess the influence of adverse events and their identification on nursing care quality and to analyse the correlation between patient safety and adverse events identification and reporting.

Material and methods: The research was conducted in hospital wards that have and do not have a Certificate of Quality Management System. In the research, the Hospital Survey on Patient Culture prepared by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality was used as well as the author’s own survey.

Results: In the survey, nurses’ activities were evaluated in the context of adverse events identification. As the most common undesirable events, the following were considered: discrepancy connected with organisation and administration (35%), medical equipment (24%), hospital infections (23%), medication administration (22%), doctor’s (20%) and nurse’s (19%) activity, and blood and blood related specimen transfusion (10%). However, these areas were not disastrous.

Conclusions: It has been stated that nurses, for fear of disciplinary consequences, are more unwilling to report such events. Therefore, it is essential to introduce legal regulations.