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Authors: Serap Torun, Osman Bilgin, Ceylan Bıçkıcı
Keywords: nursing students, medical malpractice, nursing, tendency, patient safety
Abstract: Introduction: Medical malpractice can be defined as a permanent or temporary damage occurring in the patient as a result of health workers neglecting to apply the expected standard practice or intentionally failing to do so, applying the expected standard practice incorrectly and/or incompletely or wanting to apply the right practice but failing to do so for various individual or systemic reasons. If the training periods in which health workers improve their knowledge and skills are passed efficiently, they are expected to have a low rate of error in their professional lives. Aim: Aim of the study is to determine the medical malpractice tendencies of students studying in nursing department. Material and Methods: The universe of the study consisted of 580 students who study in 3rd and 4th years in the Nursing Department of the Faculty of Health Sciences in a state university in normal and evening education and go out for clinical practice during the 2017-2018 academic year. The sample consisted of 454 students who agreed to participate in the study. Ethics committee approval, the permission of the institution and the verbal consent of the participants were obtained. In the collection of data, ‘Personal Information Form’ developed by the researchers and the ‘Malpractice Tendency Scale (MTS)’, which was developed by Özata and Altunkan (2010) and whose validity and reliability was tested, were used. The data were analyzed using SPSS 20 package program. 0.05 was used as the level of significance. Results: The Cronbach alpha internal consistency coefficient of the scale was 0.94 and the total mean value of the scale was 211.69±22.14. The mean age of the participants was 22,08±1,852 years; 165 (36,4%) were male and 288 (63,6%) were female. Their mean GPA was 2.65±0.454 (min 1.03 - max 3.90). Students' average duration of self-study per week was 2.89±3.81 (min 0 - max 30) hours. The mean score (80.73) of the 4th year students in the sub-dimension of “Drug and Transfusion Applications” was significantly higher than the mean score (79.20) of 3rd year students (p<0.05). The mean score (81.01) of the Drug and Transfusion Applications sub-dimension of those who willingly chose the profession was higher than the mean score (78.88) of those who chose the profession unwillingly. The mean average score (21.48) of “Fallings” sub-dimension of students who cared for 3 to 4 patients per day was lower than the mean score (22.41) of those who cared for 5 patients and over daily on average (p <0.05). The mean score (49.18) of the “Hospital Infections” sub-dimension of those with a GPA of less than 1.99 was lower than the mean score (52.38) of those with a GPA of 2-2.99 and the mean score (52.23) of those with a GPA higher than 3 (p<0.05). Conclusion: As a result of this study, it was concluded that malpractice tendency of nursing students was low, and an inverse relationship was found between the duration of education and malpractice tendency. The fact that curriculum programs contain subjects related to patient safety increases the awareness of the nursing students and ensures taking measures related to the subject.