904 - Do Your Students Know How to "CUS"?

Nursing students are exposed to incivility and bullying by health care professionals. Experiences are discouraging for students and may result in fear, anxiety, and their future career as nurses. Encourage students to “CUS”! The CUS (Concerned, Uncomfortable, Safety) Model is a strategy to improve civility and promote positive outcomes.

Nursing is best known as a caring and helping profession. Despite dedicated efforts to provide comfort and care, conflicts in communication can foster incivility among health care professionals, creating individual and team dissatisfaction while also putting patient safety in jeopardy. Nursing students are not always equipped to react when treated poorly by another healthcare professional or peer. According to Marshall (2017), when individuals fail to address incivility over time, it may become accepted as the new behavioral norm. Sadly, students can become victims of unchecked, uncivil behaviors, which may create undue stress and even desire to leave the profession while in training. This is a major concern during a time of a national nursing shortage and need for improved health care safety outcomes. The landmark report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health (Institute of Medicine, 2011) addressed a need to reform the nursing educational system.

Recognizing the need for transformation and change in nursing education, teaching students how to CUS can be an excellent strategy for improving outcomes. The integration of the CUS Model (Concerned, Uncomfortable, Safety) can be a positive method to teach students how to respond when situations of incivility, lateral violence, or bullying arise. The integration of the CUS model in didactic and clinical nursing education courses can be instrumental in orchestrating successful management of conflict to improve patient safety, and foster interprofessional collaboration and satisfaction with the nursing role. Using active methods, this session will assist you to integrate the CUS model into your nursing courses. Allowing and encouraging your students to “CUS” can be extremely beneficial to improve civility, sustain students in nursing education, foster improved collaboration, and, most of all, improve safety in patient care, especially during pandemic.