by Maura MacPhee
Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) is making its way into undergraduate nursing curricula, and cognitive assessment of quality/safety knowledge is a component of NCLEX, the registered nurse licensure exam.
In our March 8th brownbag, we discussed ways to integrate QSEN content in our own undergraduate nursing program. The article for this month’s brownbag (reference below) provides great, creative suggestions for QSEN integration based on the authors’ development of a first semester communications program. The authors used a QSEN framework to design content and assessments for in-class, skills labs, field work and clinical practicum. Some lessons from this article:
- Determine those critical QSEN competencies you want per term. Don’t do too much at one time. In the article, educators reinforced five critical safety behaviours: hand washing, introductions, patient-centered care communications, double patient identifiers and SBAR .
- Use different teaching modalities and cases/simulations to reinforce critical competencies. In the article, the educators used skills lab simulations and virtual simulations, readings, videos and movies and role play. Self-reflective assignments included reflection summaries after role play,
2-minute papers in class, online discussion board postings, reflective logs after field experiences (interviewing patients), and after simulations.
- Get faculty members together per semester to integrate curricular content and resources and pedagogical strategies. Remember to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce critical competencies any way you can!
Resources:
Brady, D. (2011). Using quality and safety education for nurses (QSEN) as a pedagogical structure for course redesign and content. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 8(1), 1-18.
NCLEX blueprint April 2016: https://www.ncsbn.org/RN_Test_Plan_2016_Final.pdf
