Perception of Health Teams on the Implementation of Strategies to Decrease Nursing Errors and Enhance Patient Safety [Letter]

Dear editor

We have read the article by AlThubaity et al titled “Perception of Health Teams on the Implementation of Strategies to Decrease Nursing Errors and Enhance Patient Safety”. The article highlights the importance of identifying errors, admitting mistakes, correcting unsafe conditions, and reporting systems to improve safety. It also emphasizes that many errors are never reported voluntarily or captured through other mechanisms, which can lead to failure in improvement efforts. The study investigates health teams’ perceptions of strategies used to reduce nursing error that affects patient safety.¹ The findings suggest that there is a need for improvements in the system, such as a culture not driven toward safety and unfavorable working conditions for nurses. To effectively avoid future errors that can cause patient harm, improvements must be made on the reliability organizations.

We believe that this study is crucial in addressing nursing errors in healthcare systems. It provides valuable insights into how health teams perceive strategies used to reduce nursing errors and enhance patient safety. However, We would like to suggest some additional areas for future research. Firstly, it would be interesting to investigate why many errors are never reported voluntarily or captured through other mechanisms. This could help identify barriers to reporting and provide insights into how these barriers can be overcome. Studies have shown that fear of reprisals, lack of time, and inadequate knowledge of reporting systems are some of the reasons why errors go unreported.² Investigating these barriers and finding ways to overcome them can improve reporting and ultimately enhance patient safety. Secondly, it would be useful to explore how team interventions can improve teamwork and communication in healthcare settings. Research has shown that team interventions can improve team performance outcomes.³ Therefore, exploring how these interventions can be implemented in healthcare settings could help improve patient safety. This can be achieved through interventions such as communication training, team building, and the use of standardized communication tools. Finally, it would be beneficial to investigate how public health nurses can intervene to improve population health.⁴ This could help identify effective interventions that public health nurses can use to promote population health. Some possible interventions could include promoting healthy behaviors, increasing access to healthcare services, and improving health literacy.

In conclusion, we believe that this study provides valuable insights into how health teams perceive strategies used to reduce nursing errors and enhance patient safety. However, further research is needed to address some of the gaps identified above.