Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) Competencies

This flashcard set covers the six core QSEN competencies: Patient-centered Care, Teamwork and Collaboration, Evidence-based Practice, Quality Improvement, Safety, and Informatics, as defined in nursing education standards.

Patient-centered Care (PCC)

Recognize the patient or designee as the source of control and full partner in providing compassionate and coordinated care based on respect for patient's preferences, values, and needs.

Dimensions of Patient-centered Care

A framework including patient/family/community preferences; coordination and integration of care; information, communication, and education; physical comfort and emotional support; involvement of family and friends; and transition and continuity.

Decisional Conflict

A state where a patient faces uncertainty about a course of action; nurses assess this level and provide access to resources as part of Patient-centered Care.

Teamwork and Collaboration (T&C)

Function effectively within nursing and inter-professional teams, fostering open communication, mutual respect, and shared decision-making to achieve quality patient care.

Authority Gradients

The power or hierarchy levels within a team that can influence teamwork and patient safety; choosing communication styles that diminish these risks is a key skill.

Handoffs

Communication practices used among providers and across transitions in care; minimizing risks associated with these is essential for safety and quality.

Evidence-based Practice (EBP)

Integrate best current evidence with clinical expertise and patient/family preferences and values for delivery of optimal health care.

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

The body whose guidelines must be followed to ensure the ethical conduct of research and data collection activities.

Quality Improvement (QI)

Use data to monitor the outcomes of care processes and use improvement methods to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality and safety of health care systems.

Sentinel Event

A significant event that results in patient harm, requiring a root cause analysis to identify system-level improvements.

PDSA Cycle

Plan-Do-Study-Act; an experiential learning method used to design and evaluate a small test of change in daily work.

Variation

Differences in performance or outcomes that affect care; tools like control charts and run charts are used to understand and assess this in Quality Improvement.

Safety (S)

Minimizes risk of harm to patients and providers through both system effectiveness and individual performance.

Human Factors

Basic safety design principles that account for the cognitive and physical limits of human performance to examine unsafe practices.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

A process used in understanding causes of error and allocation of responsibility by focusing on system failures rather than individual blame.

Informatics (I)

Use information and technology to communicate, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and support decision-making.

Clinical Decision-making Supports

Electronic alerts and tools within a database that assist health professionals in providing safe patient care and preventing errors.

Personal Health Records

Records that patients have a right to access; respecting this right is an integral part of therapeutic patient-centered relationships.

Evidence-based care emphasizes decision making based on the best available evidence and:

Use of outcome studies to guide decisions.

Core Concepts in Nursing Theory

• Patient

• Environment

• Health

• Nursing

A nurse researcher who plans to collect and anaylze data for the purpose of creating a new theory should select which type of research?

Basic Research

Descriptive Research

To explore and describe events in real life situations, describing concepts and identifying relationships between and among events; often used to generate new knowledge about topics with little or no prior research.

Correlational Research

To examine the type and degree of relationships between two or more variables; the strength of the relationship varies from a -1 (perfect negative correlation, in which one increases as the other decreases) to a +1 (perfect positive correlation, with both variables increasing or decreasing together)

Quasi-Experimental Research

To examine cause-and-effect relationships between selected variables; often conducted in clinical settings to examine the effects of nursing interventions on patient outcomes.

Experimental research

To examine cause-and-effect relationships between variables under highly controlled conditions; often conducted in a laboratory setting.