Greater understanding of nurse characteristics and organisational factors that influence error recovery can foster the development of effective strategies to detect and correct medical errors and enable organisations to reduce negative outcomes.

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.

Background and objective: Collaboration is an important and necessary skill to function effectively within the practice of nursing and inter-professional teams. The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the impact of collaborative testing on nursing student content retention and student perception of the collaborative testing process.Methods: A convenience sample of nursing students (n = 95) were grouped in random pairs and permitted to collaborate on exam 3 (of 5) in an entry level medical surgical nursing course. Students were surveyed with the 13-item survey, Student Evaluation of Collaborative Testing, after the collaborative exam.Results and conclusions: There was a strong, positive correlation between students’ exam 3 grades and the number of correct responses to exam 3 content items on the final exam, r = .511, p < .001. For every one-point increase on exam 3 grades, the number of correct responses on exam 3 content on the final exam increased by .511. As such, students who scored higher on exam 3 also had more correct responses to exam 3 content on the final exam. There was a strong, positive correlation between students’ exam 3 and final exam scores, r = .536, p < .001. It may (or may not) be the case that students’ who perceived collaborative learning more positively were more impacted by the collaborative learning experience, resulting in higher scores on the final exam.

Two decades after the Institute of Medicine Report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System illuminated the high number of preventable deaths and adverse events associated with health care, medical errors remain a top global concern. To date, resources have been focused on preventing medical errors; however, the importance of error recovery must not be overlooked. Medical errors cannot be fully eliminated from our health care system, yet many errors can be recovered thus preventing patient harm. This chapter will (1) define and describe the error recovery process, (2) discuss the role of health care providers in error recovery, (3) explore strategies that enhance and prohibit error recovery, and (4) analyze characteristics that influence error recovery. Given the importance of patient safety within the health care industry, health care professionals and organizations must focus on both error prevention and error recovery as a key strategy in keeping patients safe.