Perspectives on Patient Safety Education in the Kenyan Preregistration Nursing Curriculum

Patient safety education is recognised as a key ingredient in the development of safety competencies in healthcare professionals. To ensure that patient safety is emphasised in the preregistration education, it is important that it be integrated explicitly in the curriculum. This study aimed at identifying explicit patient safety concepts in the Kenyan nursing curriculum and exploring the perspectives of the nursing faculty members and clinical nurses on the integration of patient safety in the curriculum. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on the relevant curriculum documents from two universities. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted on a purposive sample of 13 staff members of the nursing faculty from the university and 14 clinical nurses from the hospitals where the students undergo clinical instruction. A thematic analysis was carried out on the transcribed interviews from which four themes and subthemes emerged. The curriculum content analysis did not identify any explicit patient safety content but the content was rather implicit within the curriculum as a series of statements and inferences to patient safety. The themes included curriculum issues, student characteristics, a patient safety culture, clinical education issues, and the academic-clinical relationship. To ensure training of a nurse who is competent in patient safety, the concepts must be integrated in the curriculum, the academic and clinical faculties need to be well equipped to teach and assess these concepts, the patient safety culture in clinical placement sites should be conducive to allow for learning about patient safety, and better collaboration between the academic and clinical settings for integration of patient safety in nursing education should be realised.