Situational Awareness: Essential Skill for Nursing Practice

Abstract

Situational awareness is the perception of environmental elements and related events in any period of time, understanding of meaning of event, anticipation or possibility of events or sensitivity to upcoming situation.  Situational awareness is therefore essential skill for managing medical harms and errors in the patient care process by which management of harms is planed in advance. For nursing practice, nurses should be promoted with effective situational awareness in four aspects namely (1) Quality of nursing staff management includes increasing effective sensory perception; understanding of situation with increase in knowledge, experience, and development of analytical thinking; practicing anticipation or imagination that emerged from incidences; and rehearsing work performance using simulation (2) Management of  instruments and technology supported-perception consists of providing sufficient instruments with quantity and quality and developing assessment form to facilitate documentation and guided practice (3) Effective and simple organization and (4) Establishment of a supportive working environment and atmosphere includes providing learning environment and setting creative working atmosphere. Readers could apply this to development of situational awareness for themselves or nursing team in anticipation of events that might cause errors and unwanted events as well as proper management and prevention and safety of patient care.