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Angela Jones Requests Your Help
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Nurses inseparably linked to patient safety


Nurses are widely recognised as being ‘inseparably linked to patient safety’. Nurses play a key role in providing continuous patient assessment, evaluation, monitoring, and informed interventions. This places them at the forefront of preventing harmful adverse events to patients. One mechanism by which nurses may prevent adverse events and positively influence patient safety outcomes is by anticipating, detecting and bridging discontinuities or ‘gaps’ in care. Just how nurses succeed in ‘getting it right’ has not been systematically investigated in Australia. New research is seeking to address this issue.
Angela Jones, a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing, Deakin University in Melbourne
is investigating what it is that nurses do ‘right’ in patient care that prevents or rescues patients from experiencing adverse events.
She is especially interested to learn how nurses foresee and discover the presence of gaps, and the actions they take to ‘get things back on track’ and prevent harmful consequences to patients. Registered Nurses employed in a variety of clinical settings such as the Emergency Department, Critical Care Unit, Operating Room and Neurology, Neurosurgery and Orthopaedics wards are being interviewed to share their stories and experiences of preventing and or rescuing patients from being harmed.

Much attention in health care is being directed to undertaking root cause analyses of adverse events in order to discover ‘what went wrong’. A key reason for undertaking these
analyses is to learn from the mistakes that were made and to put in place processes that will help to prevent future occurrences of those events. There is no doubt that valuable lessons have been learned through the use of this problem solving method. However, there are also valuable lessons to be learned by focusing on ‘safety successes’ and ‘what went right’. Angela’s research, which is being supervised by Professor Megan-Jane Johnstone and Professor Maxine Duke from Deakin’s School of Nursing, aims to capture these lessons.

Nurses who are interested in sharing their stories and experiences are invited to contact

Angela Jones directly on 0450 781 606 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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