Quality of Care and Patient Safety

Quality of Care and Patient Safety

Activities

The activities of the Quality of Care and Patient Safety (QCPS) LAB are geared to:

  • developing the clinical competencies of students;
  • understanding, integrating and applying concepts and practices that play a part in the quality and safety of care, including evidence-based nursing and the use of models and theories specific to the discipline of nursing;
  • promoting new technologies to improve the integration of knowledge and knowhow in clinical practice.

The LAB’s research activities aim to create and revisit knowledge and knowhow related to these objectives.

Approach

The professional experience of most of the members of the LAB is in connection with adult acute care settings. Consequently, priority in our teaching is given to clinical care practice (clinical assessment, technical acts, care safety, nursing interventions, communication and work relations) and to knowledge of pathologies from the clinical perspective of nursing care. We have a growing interest in developing and valorising disciplinary knowledge. Moreover, the use of new teaching technologies, such as hi-fi simulation and serious games, is one of the QCPS LAB’s areas of pedagogical development. Developing simulation activities with simulated patients allows us, in particular, to bring to life our philosophy that considers patients as deciders of and partners in their care. Our collaboration with care establishments is key to how we teach quality of care and patient safety. This partnership extends also into our research activities. It allows us to test nursing theories and propose interventions to meet patient needs. The QCPS LAB can count on numerous partners abroad, including in France, in Canada and through the Watson Caring Science Global Associates.

Profile

To ensure that the clinical education it provides is of the highest quality, the QCPS LAB abides by the standards put forth by Cronenwett et al. (2009), who defined the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by nurses in the following six areas of competency:

  • Patient-centred care Recognize the patient or their representative as a fully-fledged decider and partner by dispensing care that is empathic, coordinated and respectful of the patient’s preferences, values and needs.
  • Teamwork and collaboration Operate effectively within care and interprofessional teams and foster open communication, mutual respect, and shared decision making.
  • Evidence-based practice Integrate the best evidence available, clinical expertise and the patient’s and their family’s preferences.
  • Safety Minimise risk for harm to patients and professionals.
  • Quality improvement Use of data to measure care process outcomes and use of improvement methods and tests in exercising continuous quality analysis.
  • Informatics Use information and communication technologies to develop knowledge, prevent errors, and support clinical decision making.

Team

Research topics

Our research programme is geared to exploring, defining and proposing interventions aimed at improving the clinical practice of nurses with a view to optimizing management of adult patients living with a chronic condition. Integrating nursing theories as a guide to exploring clinical phenomena and developing interventions is a matter of priority for the QCPS LAB.

Partners

The QCPS LAB works in collaboration with a host of university partners and international teams, including:

Field partners: All of the care establishments in the Canton of Vaud.

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