Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN)

 This 30-minute webinar will introduce you to QSEN and QSEN competencies and will demonstrate how to incorporate these competencies into clinical processes.

Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN)

The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project began in 2005. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the overall goal of the QSEN initiative is to address the challenge of preparing future nurses with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in which they work.

Set forth by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), QSEN consists of a set of nursing competencies to ensure all pre-licensure nurses are educated to the same basic level for entry to practice and another set of graduate level competencies for the licensed RN. AORN has incorporated QSEN pre-licensure competencies into the Introduction to Perioperative Nursing course and the graduate competencies into the Periop 101: A Core Curriculum™ programs for OR, ASC, and C-Section.

Now available as part of the Periop 101: A Core Curriculum™ are the graduate level QSEN competencies. Incorporating QSEN into the online course and clinical course work will allow learners to apply these competencies to real-time patient care, case studies, and simulation experiences.

Periop 101 learners will be able to:

  • Recognize the patient as a full partner in providing compassionate and coordinated care based on respect for the patient’s preferences, values, and needs.
  • Function effectively within nursing and inter-professional teams, fostering open communication, mutual respect, and shared decision-making to achieve quality patient care.
  • Use data to monitor the outcomes of care processes, and use improvement methods to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality and safety of health care systems.
  • Minimize risk of harm to patients and providers through both system effectiveness and individual performance.
  • Use information and technology to communicate, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and support decision making.

QSEN Graduate Level Competencies

To help support quality and safety education for nurses, AORN has developed the Introduction to QSEN online module. This new module incorporates QSEN principles in the following categories:

- Patient-Centered Care
- Teamwork and Collaboration
- Evidence-Based Practice
- Quality Improvement
- Safety
- Informatics