Abstract:
Clinical instructors played an essential role to the improvement of patient safety in the clinical settings.
A preliminary study with a qualitative design to nursing students in the profession program indicated
that the clinical instructors focused their attention on the attainment of student’s clinical competences.
Yet, the aspect of patient safety issues was ignored or addressed in a narrow manner. This study aimed
to evaluate the effectiveness of optimizing clinical instructors’ roles to improve the students’ ability in
implementing patient safety based clinical practices. This pre-experimental study used pre and posttest
designs without control groups. The clinical instructors received daily text messages (by using a SMS
gateway) concerning patient safety information. The text contained information on how to achieve six
goals of patient safety. The study comprised 125 observations, which were analyzed by using
Wilcoxon test. This study revealed that the score of clinical instructors’ roles to improve students’
ability in implementing patient safety based clinical practices increased by 2.66 (6.44%). The study
furthermore showed a significant improvement of clinical instructors’ roles on the intervention stage
compared to that on the pre-intervention stage (p <0.001; CI = 1.948: 3.380). Patient safety information
through SMS gateway was effective to improve the competences of students to implement six goals of
patient safety in the clinical practices.
