Nations around the world faced mounting problems in health care, including rising costs, challenges to accessing services, and wide variations in safety and quality. Sereval reports and surveys had clearly demonstrated that adverse events and errors pose serious threats to patient safety. It had become obvious that future health professional will need to address such problems in the quality of patient care.

    The article discussed a research study examining improvement knowledge in clinical practice as experienced by nursing students with respect to a patient-centred perspective, knowledge of health-care processes,the handling of adverse events, cross-professional collaboration, and the development of new knowledge. Six focus groups were conducted,comprising a total of 27 second-year students.

    The resulting discoursed were recorded,coded and analysed. The findings indicated a deficiency in improment knowledge in clinical practice, and a gap between what students learn about patient care and what they observe.

    In addition, the findings suggested that there was a need to change the culture in health care and health professional education, and to develop learning models that encourage reflection, openness, and scrutiny of underlying individual and organizational values and assumption in health care.