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Path analytic models are useful tools in quantitative nursing research. They allow researchers to hypothesize causal inferential paths and test the significance of these paths both directly and indirectly through a mediating variable. A standard statistical method in the path analysis literature is to treat the variables as having a normal distribution and to estimate paths using several least ...

The study by Lapane and Quilliam published in this issue of Journal of the American Medical Directors Association explores an important issue in social science methodology, namely, how to distribute resident safety perception questionnaires among nursing home employees in a manner that will yield the highest response rate (and presumably the most reliable data). From a social policy and clinica...

More than a decade after the publication of To Err Is Human, cognitive error remains a mystery to physicians. Competent and conscientious physicians rarely recall making a single cognitive error, yet this must be central to the explanation for inappropriate physician nonadherence to evidence-based guidelines. Published information regarding cognitive error in the medical literature is scarce an...

Preventing medication and chemotherapy errors is a priority in oncology nursing. In this article, a case is presented detailing a medication error that occurred because of inadequate assessment. Such errors still can occur despite electronic systems designed to increase medication administration safety. The authors will discuss implications for oncology nurses.
AT A GLANCE: Chemotherapy errors ...

Non-compliance is not only an epistemological error but a biological impossibility. This profound statement arises from the influence of Humberto Maturana's revolutionary meta-theory of cognition. The definitions and significant implications of two major theoretical concepts of this meta-theory of cognition, namely structural determinism and objectivity-in-parenthesis, are discussed. These radi...

PURPOSE Medication errors remain a threat to patient safety. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the relationships among characteristics of the nursing practice environment, nurse staffing levels, nurses' error interception practices, and rates of nonintercepted medication errors in acute care hospitals. DESIGN This study, using a nonexperimental design, was conducted in a s...