Applying Lonergan in Clinical Undergraduate Nursing Education: Mitigating Preventable Inpatient Deaths Due to Error

In 1998, the Institute of Medicine drew attention to the fact that 98,000 preventable deaths occur annually in hospitals throughout the United States. Ten years later (2008) the American Association of Colleges of Nursing highlighted the importance of providing safe and quality patient care as they defined the goals of a new project “Quality and Safety Education for Nurses”(QSEN). The QSEN initiative addresses the challenge of preparing future nurses with the knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA’s) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in which they will work. Seton Hall University-College of Nursing prepares future nurses to consider and apply the KSA’s that provide a solid foundation in preventing healthcare error resulting in patient deaths, while this project seeks to further understand “how” to best accomplish it.

This application of Lonergan’s ‘imperatives’ of Human Understanding, along with a highly focused consideration of Lonergan’s eighth Functional Specialty: ‘Communication’ provide the underpinnings and foundation of this small project. These new concepts provided nursing students the opportunity to intersect the QSEN competency “Teamwork & Collaboration” with Lonergan’s thoughts on the phenomenology of Human Understanding and Communication during their clinical Maternal-Newborn Nursing experience. The goal of integrating QSEN and Lonergan precepts was to enhance the development of authenticity within their beginning basic nursing practice, thereby resulting in fewer preventable in-patient errors, especially errors that result in death, throughout their nursing career.

This work is an imperative of the highest order within undergraduate clinical nursing education and has not been addressed in the literature. Throughout a student-nurse’s education, there is didactic intellectual content as well as clinical application activities within the hospital setting. The work within this project provides a foundation for fuller academic application of Lonergan’s philosophy within the QSEN competency “Teamwork & Collaboration”. It may additionally provide a platform for Lonergan philosophical applications within the remaining QSEN competencies, within other nursing courses and within future nursing curriculum approaches focused on mitigating preventable inpatient deaths related to error on a global level.