Nurses’ Performance in Patient Safety Risk Detection in a Room of Errors Within a Hospital Setting: Observational Repeated Cross-Sectional Study
Lucia Saponaro, Stefano Cocchi, Michele Villa, Loris Bonetti, Giovanna Pezzoli, Corina Elena LucaIntroduction
Hospitalisation exposes patients to potential hazards that can cause them harm and that are not always detected. The Room of Errors is an exercise used to train situational awareness.
Objective
To evaluate changes in nurses’ performance in patient safety risk detection over time in repeated simulation-based scenarios.
Methods
This was an observational, repeated cross-sectional study. The Room of Errors was set up to replicate a hospital room. The scenarios proposed over the years were diversified, maintaining the focus of the errors on hospitalisation. During the simulations, a structured response form was used to record identified errors, and a brief ad hoc questionnaire was employed to assess participant satisfaction.
Results
A total of 272 nurses participated in the study from 2019 to 2021. The percentage of errors identified improved significantly over the three years (2019 = 44.2 ± 9.7; 2020 = 50.6 ± 15.6; 2021 = 54.1 ± 15.7, p < 0.001). We found a statistically significant increase of 6.3% (95% CI 1.9–10.8) from 2019 to 2020 and of 9.8% (95% CI 4.6–14.9) between 2019 and 2021. The nurses who participated in more than one exercise over the years performed significantly better than those who participated for the first time (55 ± 16 vs 47 ± 13, p < 0.001), as did those who performed the exercise in groups compared to those who did it individually (50 ± 13 vs 4 5 ± 15, p = 0.01). Overall, 84.2% of the participants would recommend the exercise to colleagues.
Conclusions
Nurses showed a modestly enhanced ability to detect risk over the years. The Room of Errors may represent a useful educational strategy for promoting patient safety awareness among nurses. In future studies, it would be interesting to understand whether this activity has an impact on reducing the errors that actually occur in clinical practice.