Abstract

Background and objectives: Patient safety is an essential and vital component of quality nursing care. However, the nation's health care system is prone to errors, and can be detrimental to safe patient care due to basic system flaws. Studies in different parts of the world have reported nursing errors, which resulted in excess injuries and unnecessary deaths. The study aimed to assess nursing errors generally in some of daily activities through nursing work.
Methods: A descriptive study was conducted between November 2, 2013 and January 30, 2014. It was implemented on a convenience sample of the nursing staff (94 nurses) working at three teaching hospitals in the Mosul city. A preliminary open-end question was directed to nurses (11) regarding errors and mistakes that can occur in daily nursing activities. Then a self-administered checklist was constructed for the study, which consisted of three main aspects: nursing administration (14 items), personal aspect and communication (9 items), and professional aspect (19 items). Each item had two options (no = 1; yes = 2). SPSS 11.5 was used to analyze data through descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage) and inferential statistics (chi-square), while P ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.
Results: Majority of the nurses were in both the surgical and internal medicine wards (37.2%) and in hospital A (38.3%). Most (40.4%) of them had a tenure of 20–29 years of work. Majority of the errors were due to professional activities (84.21%) followed by management and administration aspects (64.29%) and personal aspects (77.8%).
Conclusion: The study found that the role of nurses is functional and not professional, as it clearly lacks; job  description, proper professional relationships, sense of belonging to the profession, sense of responsibility, adherence to professional rules at work, lack of patient care, and staying away from career development. The study recommends: emphasis on nursing documentation during daily work, nursing process in caring the patient, and emphasis on sterilization and disinfection guidelines. 

Keywords: Nurse, error, nursing, nursing work