Nursing Quality Related to Medical Incidents

A tool for measuring the quality of nursing care was developed in Japan in 1993. This tool consists of three dimensions: structure, process, and outcome. One aspect of the outcome dimension, specifically nursing-sensitive medical incidents such as falls, downfalls, pressure ulcers, hospital infections and drug-related errors was measured. In this study, aspects of nursing care that may influence the frequency of medical incidents were examined. As the above five medical incidents were differentially related to each other, they were summarized under two factors using principal component analysis. Factor 1 comprised falls, downfall, pressure ulcers and drug-related errors. Factor 2 comprised hospital infections and pressure ulcers. All domains of the structure and process of "incident prevention" were related to factor 1. These variables were able to explain 46.1% of the variance in factor 1. Most of all the domains of structure, and process of "patient empowerment", "direct care", and "incident prevention" were related to factor 2. These variables were able to explain 45.5% of the variance in factor 2.