Effects of an Education Program on Prevention of Malpractice using Precedent Cases related to Patient Safety in Safety Perception, Safety Control, Autonomy and Accountability in Clinical Nurses / 간호행정학회지

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of an education program on safety perception, safety control, autonomy and accountability in clinical nurses. Precedent cases related to patient safety were used in the education program. METHODS: A quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest measures was used. Participants in the study, 72 nurses in the experimental group, 71 nurses in the control group, were enrolled for 3 months. The education program was composed of the 20 precedent cases related to patient safety from home and foreign countries. RESULTS: The major findings of this study were as follows: Safety perception (p=.000), Safety control (p=.000), attitude toward autonomy (p=.000), and attitude toward accountability (p=.000) improved after the education program. CONCLUSION: The findings from this study indicate that an education program using precedent cases is an efficient method to improve behavior and change attitudes towards protecting patients' safety and preventing malpractice claims against nurses.

A Comparative Study on the Validity of Fall Risk Assessment Scales in Korean Hospitals

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to compare the validity of three fall risk assessment scales including the Morse Fall Scale (MFS), the Bobath Memorial Hospital Fall Risk Assessment Scale (BMFRAS), and the Johns Hopkins Hospital Fall Risk Assessment Tool (JHFRAT). METHODS: This study was a prospective validation cohort study in five acute care hospitals in Seoul and Gyeonggi-Do, Korea. In total, 356 patients over the age of 18 years admitted from December 2009 to February 2010 participated. The three fall risk assessment scales listed above were tested for sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive and negative predictive values. A receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve was generated to show sensitivities and specificities for predicting falls based on different threshold scores for considering patients at high risk. RESULTS: Based on the mean scores of each scale for falls, the MFS at a cut-off score of 50 had a sensitivity of 78.9%, specificity of 55.8%, positive predictive value of 30.8%, and negative predictive value of 91.4%, which were the highest values among the three fall assessment scales. Areas under the curve of the ROC curves were .761 for the MFS, .715 for the BMFRAS, and .708 for the JHFRAT. CONCLUSIONS: Accordingly, of the three fall risk assessment scales, the highest predictive validity for identifying patients at high risk for falls was achieved by the MFS.