Saudi Nursing Students Attitudes Towards Patient Safety and The Influencing Factors. A Quantitative and Qualitative study at the College of Nursing-Jeddah Hashish Ebtsam Aly Abou1,2,*, Aljuaid Wa'ad2, Almuzaini Ohud2 1Assistant Professor. Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University, Egypt 2College of Nursing, King Saud bin Abdul-Aziz University for Health Sciences, Saudi Arabia *Corresponding Author E-mail: ebtsam_ss@hotmail.com
Online published on 24 February, 2020. Abstract Background Patient safety becomes a challenging discipline in educational institutions and hospitals. As future nurses, it is expected from nursing students to have adequate knowledge and inspirational attitude towards promoting patient safety. Purpose The aim of this study was to assess the attitudes of Saudi nursing students towards patient safety at the College of Nursing-Jeddah. Further, to identify factors influence their attitude towards patient safety. Methods Mixed method research was conducted using a concurrent triangulation design. Attitude Towards Patient Safety Questionnaire was developed by the researchers and given to all nursing students (N=296) who enrolled in the academic year 2017–2018 to collect the quantitative data, while a qualitative investigation guided by in-depth interview was conducted with a purposive sample of 14 nursing students to identify factors influencing their attitude towards patient safety. Appropriate statistical analysis was applied while Qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. Result The present study concluded that Saudi Nursing students manifested high and positive attitude towards patient safety and indicated that their attitude not affected by the academic level or learning experience. “Teaching patient safety issues” scored as the highest dimension compared to "error disclosure and management dimensions" which rated as the lowest dimension of students’ attitude. Many factors extracted from qualitative content analysis seem to influence students’ attitude towards patient safety identified as facilitators or barriers and thematically categorized as; "patient factors”, “staff factors", and “work environment factors” with 25 sub-factors under these themes. Conclusions and Recommendation Nursing students should be supported by adequate training to enhance their safety attitude, knowledge and practice. Error reporting and disclosure culture should be a norm in health care environment. Various teaching-learning strategies including traditional teaching and Problem Based Learning should be integrated by nurse educators for enhancing nursing students’ problem solving and critical thinking in order to bridge the identified theory-practice gap. Top Keywords Patient Safety, Nursing Students, Saudi Arabia, Attitude, Qualitative content analysis, In-depth Interview. Top |