The future nursing workforce in Australia : baseline data for a prospective study of the profile, attrition rates and graduate outcomes in a contemporary cohort of undergraduates.

To gather data from ten universities across two Australia states in order to: provide a descriptive demographic profile of undergraduate Australian nursing students; provide baseline data for a prospective analysis of attrition within undergraduate nursing programs; and to facilitate student recruitment into a prospective cohort study to examine graduate outcomes

Cohort profile: The nurses and midwives e-cohort study: A novel electronic longitudinal study

Nurses and midwives comprise the largest professional group in most national health systems, so shortfalls in numbers can have a substantial impact on health care delivery. A scarcity of human resources in health has been internationally recognized and has led the International Council of Nurses to launch the Global Workforce Project in 2004, and the World Health Organization to announce the Health Workforce Decade 2006–15 in 2006.1,2 Efforts to address workforce needs through coherent workforce planning and policy setting are hampered by the complexity of predicting the supply of and demand for nurses and midwives, and the challenges associated with understanding drivers of workforce retention.3 Available workforce descriptors among regulatory authorities vary considerably; and collections are mostly cross-sectional, frequently incomplete and typically limited to administrative databases. In Australia and New Zealand, workforce issues include the migration of staff between states and countries, and critical personnel shortages in rural and remote communities; although data limitations preclude clear delineation.3,4 One response to the problem of insufficient available information on which to base workforce planning, the Nurses and Midwives e-cohort study, was conceived by its director and developed by a team of researchers at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. In the first instance the study focused on an investigation of the Queensland workforce. Pilot data and other findings,5–7 suggested a desirable initial aim was to conduct a longitudinal examination of recruitment and retention in the Queensland nursing and midwifery workforce to better understand time-related patterns affecting retention and loss. Encouraged by the planned move of professional registrations to an on-line format, we attempted to maximize efficiency by adapting traditional longitudinal research methods to a novel electronic cohort (e-cohort) design. We envisioned that participants would primarily engage with and respond to the study using email and the Internet; a strategy which has not yet entered mainstream epidemiology.8 From the project's inception, professional associations and industry partners committed funds and other support and helped establish credibility and relevance to stakeholders and potential participants. As the Queensland component was being developed, the value of expanding the cohort to increase sample size and to cover a variety of settings was apparent so academic colleagues elsewhere in Australia and in New Zealand were invited to join the research team. All nursing and midwifery councils in Australia and the Nursing Council of New Zealand were then approached to seek their collaboration to enable this expansion

A cross-sectional survey of nursing students' patient safety knowledge

Background: Knowledge provides a foundation for safe and effective nursing practice. However, most previous studies have focused on exploring nursing students' self-reported perceptions of, or confidence in, their level of patient safety knowledge, rather than examining their actual levels of knowledge. Objective: The overarching objective of this study was to examine final year nursing students' levels of knowledge about key patient safety concepts. Design: A cross-sectional design was used for this study. Data collection was undertaken during 2018 using a web-based patient safety quiz with 45 multiple choice questions informed by the Patient Safety Competency Framework for Nursing Students. A Modified Angoff approach was used to establish a pass mark or ‘cut score’ for the quiz. Setting and participants: Nursing students enrolled in the final year of a pre-registration nursing program in Australia or New Zealand were invited to participate in the study. Results: In total, 2011 final year nursing students from 23 educational institutions completed the quiz. Mean quiz scores were 29.35/45 or 65.23% (SD 5.63). Participants achieved highest scores in the domains of person-centred care and therapeutic communication, and lowest scores for infection prevention and control and medication safety. Based on the pass mark of 67.3% determined by the Modified Angoff procedure, 44.7% of students (n = 899) demonstrated passing performance on the quiz. For eight of the institutions, less than half of their students achieved a passing mark. Conclusions: Given the pivotal role that nurses play in maintaining patient safety, the results from this quiz raise important questions about the preparation of nursing students for safe and effective clinical practice. The institutional results also suggest the need for increased curricula attention to patient safety. © 2020 Elsevier Lt