Practice Environments and Patient Safety

CNA has created the Patient Safety Resource Guide for nurses to support the timely efforts both nationally and internationally to improve patient safety practices. This resource was designed to help guide the RN, in all domains of practice, through this prolific area of study. This tool should benefit nurses as they strive to make the organizational shifts and changes needed to promote patient safety and reduce risk and errors in the health care system.

The CNA Patient Safety Resource Guide is a web based, fully searchable database containing references related to all aspects of patient safety. For ease of use, the references have been classified into 11 categories. Some of the references fall clearly into one of the defined categories, while others speak to aspects of several categories.

Each reference is cited with abstracts, listed by author. Other reference materials in the guide include a selected list of web sites concerned with patient safety and a tool for ranking of relevant articles for educational or research purposes where evaluating and possibly ranking the references would be helpful.

While this guide is by no means an exhaustive collection of the literature, it does contain a variety of references including Canadian materials, major research papers, articles, studies, reports, speaker notes from conferences and PowerPoint presentations. Much of the literature comes from formal bibliographic databases, representing the majority of published journal articles included in the guide. Other resources include government documents, research papers developed by think tanks and policy departments as well as newspaper articles. These resources, often referred to as grey literature, are more difficult to access. Their inclusion in this guide results in a varied collection of references and should prove useful to the RN in acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the complex issues of patient safety.