Disclosing and Reporting Practice Errors by Nurses in Residential Long-Term Care Settings: A Systematic Review

Patient safety is crucial for the sustainability of the healthcare system. However, this may be jeopardized by the high prevalence of practice errors, particularly in residential long-term care. Development of improvement initiatives depends on full reporting and disclosure of practice errors. This systematic review aimed to understand factors that influence disclosing and reporting practice errors by nurses in residential long-term care settings. A systematic review using an integrative design was conducted. Electronic databases including PubMed (including Medline), Scopus, CINAHL, Embase, and Nordic and Spanish databases were searched using keywords relating to reporting and disclosing practice errors by nurses in residential long-term care facilities to retrieve articles published between 2010 and 2019. The search identified five articles, including a survey, a prospective cohort, one mixed-methods and two qualitative studies. The review findings were presented under the categories of the theoretical domains of Vincent’s framework for analyzing risk and safety in clinical practice: ‘patient’, ‘healthcare provider’, ‘task’, ‘work environment’, and ‘organisation & management’. The review findings highlighted the roles of older people and their families, nurses’ individual responsibilities, knowledge and collaboration, workplace atmosphere, and support by nurse leaders for reporting and disclosing practice errors, which had implications for improving the quality of healthcare services in residential long-term care settings.