Assessing Quality and Safety Competencies of Graduating Prelicensure Nursing Students

The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project is focused on enhancing nursing curricula and fostering faculty development to support student achievement of quality and safety competencies. The purpose of this descriptive study was to assess student perspectives of quality and safety content in their nursing programs along with self-reported levels of preparedness and perceived importance of the 6 QSEN competencies. Graduating students (n = 565) from 17 US schools of nursing completed an electronic student evaluation survey. Students reported exposure to QSEN knowledge areas, more often in classroom and clinical learning settings than in skills lab/simulation settings. Clinical experience outside of formal education was associated with perceptions of a higher level of preparedness for QSEN skills in several competencies. In general, students reported relatively high levels of preparedness in all types of prelicensure nursing programs and endorsed the importance of quality and safety competencies to professional practice.