Background Continuous training of healthcare professionals has a key role in preventing medication errors. In order to increase nurses’ safety culture, we developed a play based training scenario for error checking. Based on a preliminary study regarding errors reported in our hospital, 14 errors on administration of injectable potassium chloride, heparin and insulin were included in the scenario and placed in a standardised patient room.

Purpose To evaluate the training impact on nurses’ awareness and knowledge of administration errors.

Material and methods 2 training sessions of 5 days and 5 nights occurred 3 months apart. The same nurses were invited to participate in the 2 sessions by their head nurses. Trainers conducted a briefing before the error checking, and a debriefing with information on errors. We compared the number of errors detected by nurses during the first and second sessions. Statistical analyses were done on R Software 3.1.3 on matched data.

Results 198 nurses participated in the first session and 151 in the second session. Nurses’ characteristics were homogeneous between the 2 sessions. Mean score for the first session (7.99 errors; SD 1.88) was significantly lower than for the second session (10.30 errors; SD 1.96) (p value <10^-15). Regarding error detection rates, the 3 greatest improvements were for the ‘wrong patient’ (+40%), the ‘wrong syringe to administrate the insulin’ (+38%) and the ‘wrong potassium chloride storage’ (+37%). Concerning nurses’ opinions of the training, more than 95% were satisfied or very satisfied with the concepts, the topics chosen, the quality of the briefing and debriefing, and the material conditions, and 77% for the time given for the errors checking. 91% felt that they had learnt about errors and 92% would like to repeat the experiment.

Conclusion Learning from our mistakes is one of the first steps towards a safer care system. This study has shown the effectiveness of our training on increasing nurses’ awareness and safety culture. Furthermore, this playful training aroused great satisfaction from participants, except for the time given for error checking. This point will be corrected in further sessions. In future, we will use this type of training with other topics, such as hygiene and haemovigilance.

No conflict of interest