Nurse judgements of hospitalized patients' safety concerns are affected by patient, nurse and event characteristics: A factorial survey experiment.
Patricia S Groves, Amany Farag, Yelena Perkhounkova and 3 others
PMID 39008405WHAT IT FOUND
Nurses judged medication errors as more credible and concerning than miscommunications.
However, when harm was absent, they reported low-income patients more often than high-income ones. When harm was present, they reported Black patients more often than White patients.
Key findings
01Nurses rated medication errors as more credible, concerning, and likely to be reported than miscommunications.
02When no harm occurred, nurses expressed more concern for and were more likely to report safety events involving low-income patients compared to high-income patients.
03When harm was present, nurses were significantly more likely to report events involving Black non-Hispanic patients than those involving Asian or White non-Hispanic patients.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used hypothetical vignettes, so actual reporting behavior in real clinical settings may differ. Participants were mostly from urban settings in four US states, limiting generalizability to rural areas or other regions. Some patient characteristics, like sexual orientation and race, were presented subtly via photos or captions, which participants might not have noticed or interpreted as intended. The study did not capture the influence of hospital culture or specific unit policies on reporting behavior.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that nurses systematically underreport concerns for all marginalized groups. The study found that nurses were actually more likely to report events involving low-income patients when no harm occurred, and more likely to report events involving Black patients when harm was present. The bias observed was complex and context-dependent, not a simple pattern of neglect.