Fostering Future Leadership in Quality and Safety in Health Care through Systems Thinking

• Nurse graduates of RN-BSN completion programs are poised for critical leadership in quality and safety in health care due to their recent education and practice experience.
• Integrating systems thinking in to RN-BSN curricula, using BSN Essentials and QSEN competencies. is key to leadership.
• A model for curriculum design for systems thinking, the Systems-level Awareness Model is presented.
• Teaching strategies for systems thinking and student learning outcomes are detailed.
• A tool for evaluating systems thinking, the Systems Thinking Tool, is described.

There is a critical need for leadership in quality and safety to reform today's disparate spectrum of health services to serve patients in complex health care environments. Nurse graduates of degree completion programs (registered nurse–bachelor of science in nursing [RN-BSN]) are poised for leadership due to their recent education and nursing practice experience. The authors propose that integration of systems thinking into RN-BSN curricula is essential for developing these much needed leadership skills. The purpose of this article is to introduce progressive teaching strategies to help nurse educators achieve the student competencies described in the second essential of the BSN Essentials document (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2009), linking them with the competencies in Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN; L. Cronenwett et al., 2007) using an author-created model for curricular design, the Systems-level Awareness Model. The Systems Thinking Tool (M. A. Dolansky & S. M. Moore, 2013) can be used to evaluate systems thinking in the RN-BSN curriculum.