Quality and safety education for nurses: a nursing leadership skills exercise.

The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative was established to answer the Institute of Medicine's trio of reports that stress the need to enhance the quality and safety of health care in the United States. The initiative has resulted in six competencies, along with innovative curricular guides to better prepare nurses to improve the health care systems within which they work. Participating in a root cause analysis (RCA) is one of several teaching strategies common to the development of QSEN competencies. This article describes the development, evaluation, and revision of a nursing leadership skills exercise that enabled students to participate in an RCA. In addition to making learning relevant, this exercise focused student attention on the nation's concern about the quality and safety of health care in the United States.