In the nursing profession, safety is the foundation of quality patient care.  There cannot be high quality of care if safety needs are not met or maintained.  Quality reflects the likelihood that positive health outcomes will be met and safety reflects the prevention of harm or adverse events.  Nursing has a vital role in ensuring quality and safety to patients.  This includes doing whatever is best for the patient every single time.  It means giving the right person the correct dose of medication at the right time, via the right route and for the right reason.  It is delivering patient centered care that places patient needs above convenience.  It includes application of evidenced based research in clinical decision making. Quality and safety allows the prioritization of what must occur for the person to heal and communication of results and findings with the rest of the interdisciplinary team. 

            In the course Organizational Systems and Quality Leadership, task 2 involved conducting a root cause analysis to answer why a sentinel event occurred.  Learning how to break down a scenario and identify where lines of communication in the interdisciplinary team broke down, policies were not followed completely and available resources were not used showed how lapses in safety and quality can lead to devastating outcomes.  Even good, fully qualified competent nurses can make seemingly small mistakes that destroy the safety and quality of patient care.  This taught me the importance of quality and safety as a foundation in order to deliver competent nursing care.  Working through the absence of quality and safety in this exercise helped shape my understanding and definition of quality and safety in healthcare. 

            To earn the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) certificate of completion, I completed online courses on patient safety, person and family centered care, improvement capability and leadership.   These courses taught me how to evaluate current practices and discern where possible breaks in patient safety could occur.  It provided insight on ways to bring change to the workplace and improve patient safety.  Completion of the IHI course gave me the knowledge, confidence and means that I need to be a better nurse and example and leader as I strive to deliver safe, high quality care patient centered care.