He asked her whether she really thought she should share the story openly. With 22 students gathered in a circle in the classroom, Sarah * prefaced the reading of her story by confiding that she had read it to her husband before class. It was made clear that they needed to write something they could share with others, as we would set aside class time to read their stories aloud. Students in the Advanced Clinical Nursing class that I taught were assigned to write a paradigm case-a story that reflected an ethical dilemma that they had experienced in their clinical practice. How can nurses help to address this problem by shaping a culture of safety in healthcare? Keep reading for some helpful, safety-promoting suggestions. In international comparisons of deaths that are considered preventable by timely and effective healthcare, data showed that the United States had the highest number of preventable deaths in comparison to nine other countries, with France and Australia being the lowest ( Nolte & McKee, 2011). In 2016, researchers at Johns Hopkins found that medical errors replaced respiratory disease as the third leading cause of death ( Makary & Daniels, 2016 McMains, 2016). In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ranked the top three causes of death as heart disease, cancer, and respiratory disease.

Patient safety experts at Johns Hopkins have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year in the United States are caused by medical errors ( McMains, 2016).

Nonmaleficence ethical principle