The relationship between professional competence and medical error tendency among final-year nursing students.
Arife Şanlialp Zeyrek, Sümeyye Arslan, Özlem Fidan
Higher self-reported competence was strongly linked to lower medical error tendency among 125 final-year nursing students.
General clinical skills, critical thinking, and ethics were the strongest predictors. The study is correlational and self-reported, so it shows association, not causation.
Key findings
1A significant positive correlation was found between professional competence and medical error tendency (r = .713, p < 0.01), meaning higher competence was associated with a lower tendency to make medical errors.
2General clinical skills (B = 0.401, p = 0.000), critical thinking and reasoning (B = 0.234, p = 0.014), and ethics and accountability (B = 0.187, p = 0.034) were identified as significant predictors of medical error tendency, with the model explaining 54% of the variance.
3Students scored highest in ethics and accountability (6.43) and lowest in clinical biomedical science (5.83) on the competency scale, and had the highest error tendency in patient monitoring and equipment safety (4.29).
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Single university in western Turkey, so the findings may not generalise to other educational or clinical settings. All data are self-report. Students rated their own competence and their own error tendency, which introduces social desirability bias and the possibility that less experienced students overestimate their abilities (the Dunning-Kruger effect). The design is cross-sectional and correlational. It cannot show that competence causes fewer errors, only that the two are associated at one point in time. The regression model left about half the variance in error tendency unexplained, so other factors such as workload, stress, and the clinical environment are not accounted for. The sample is 78.4% female, which limits how the gender-related findings apply to male students.
Declared interests
The authors state they received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the r = .713 correlation as proof that improving competence will reduce errors. The study is cross-sectional, self-reported, and from one university. It shows that students who felt more competent also reported fewer errors, but it cannot establish that one causes the other, and the self-report method means both scores may be inflated or deflected by social desirability.
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