Qsen History
In response to calls for improved quality and safety, leaders from schools of nursing across the country joined forces to create the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2005 funded QSEN Phase 1 and three subsequent phases followed (Table 1). The major QSEN contribution to healthcare education was the creation of six QSEN competencies (modeled after the IOM reports) and the pre-licensure and graduate-level knowledge, skills, and attitude (KSA) statements for each competency (Cronenwett et al., 2007). The competency statements provide a tool for faculty and staff development educators to identify gaps in curriculum so that changes to incorporate quality and safety education can be made (Barnsteiner et al., 2013). The QSEN website serves as a national educational resource and a repository for nurses to publish contemporary teaching strategies focused on the six competencies: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidenced-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. Currently, there are over 100 teaching strategies posted.
QSEN competencies have been used by national nursing organizations and are the central focus of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (n.d.) Nurse Residency program, the foundational concepts in the Massachusetts Future of Nursing Framework (Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, 2010), and the Ohio Hospital Association (Ohio Organization of Nurse Executives, 2013). The QSEN competencies also have been incorporated into nursing textbooks such as the medical-surgical text by Ignatavicious and Workman (2013), and other books, such as Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Approach to Improving Outcomes (Sherwood & Barnsteiner, 2012), Second Generation QSEN, a special issue of the Nursing Clinics of North America (Barnsteiner & Disch, 2012) and Quality and Safety for Transformational Leadership (Amer, 2012).