Reaching the Core of Nursing Quality: Defining Situation Awareness in Nursing

Patient care error remains the eighth leading cause of death. Nursing work requires a constant state of attention to the unexpected with the capacity to perceive multiple perspectives. Nursing work environments are high-hazard, cognitively demanding, interdependent with little margin for human error. Patient care errors have been attributed to human factors in 80 percent of the cases. The greatest factor influencing attention is situation awareness (SA).