Abstract
The purpose of this study was to elucidate the level of nursing staff's understanding of their liability in nursing practice in Japan. From four general hospitals in the Tokyo Metropolitan area, 1361 nurses were surveyed using a newly-developed self-reporting questionnaire designed to determine their understanding of their level of liability in nursing practice in the event of a medical accident.
Factor analysis showed that the scale of nurses' understanding of their own liability comprised two factors: "self-awareness of one's duty as a nurse" and "refusal to shift liability onto doctors". The validity of this scale, and the reliability using the test-retest method had been confirmed. Nursing staff's judgment of the degree of their liability was considerably affected by the circumstance of a medical accident. It was suggested that nurses had two internal criteria to make such judgments: whether or not "the average nurse might have foreseen the accident when assessing the situation", and whether or not "the nurse should have foreseen and avoided the accident even though the accident should have been foreseen and prevented by the doctor in charge."
