Little Room of Errors
Submitter Information
Robin Arends ,
MS, CNP
Assistant Professor
The University of South Dakota
414 East Clark St.
Vermillion ,
SD
57069
Teaching Strategy
Competency Category(s)
Learner Level(s)
- Pre-licensure ADN/diploma
- Pre-licensure BSN
- RN to BSN
- New graduates/transition to practice
Learner Setting(s)
- Clinical settings
- Skills or simulation laboratories
Strategy Type
- Other
Learning Objectives
- Communicate observations or concerns related to safety and hazards in the environment for the patient.
- Identify safety hazards in the patient environment that will cause harm or could potentially lead to harm.
- Determine safety hazards that are patient related, health- care provider related, or system related.
Strategy Overview
The goal of this strategy is to allow students to identify as many errors or hazards in a patient environment. Prior to the clinical or laboratory experience, faculty “creates” a patient room that has errors or hazards. This room may have 1 side rail down, water on the floor, patient allergy band stating Morphine and Morphine ordered on an open medication administration record, long cords strung over the patient’s bed, uncapped needles with “blood,” medications not locked up, cigarettes and a lighter in a purse, pills in a purse, etc. The options are endless. The student enters the room and has a certain amount of time to find the errors. If there are a lot of errors, you may give the student 1 minute to determine errors or allow them to roam throughout the room to see the errors. The hospital that set this up for their employees and our students that I participated in had 115 errors in it, so students were allowed to have 15 minutes. After each student does this individually, we discuss what we saw as a group. Then I take the students through as a group and point out errors that were missed by everyone. There is a lot of discussion as to what makes something a hazard or not
Submitted Materials
Evaluation Description
This is an ungraded assignment, but could turn into a fun competition by the students to discover who could identify the most errors in the room.
Publication Date
Jul 28 2009