Across medication error literature, much attention has been given to incidence, types, causes and prevention of medication errors. Considering the numerous studies on medication errors committed by registered nurses, little is known on the nature of student nurses' medication error. Faculty concentrate on teaching nursing students about safe medication administration practices and on challenging them to develop skills for calculating drug dose. In spite of these efforts, students make medication errors and little is known about the attributes of these errors.
In education an error is regarded as a learning sphere to be exploited so that changes may come about and a precept may be learned. We tried to analyze how this concept can be transposed to core nursing education, with an in-depth study of how students face up with errors (either real or potential) and how they manage to re-elaborate them with the aim of learning from them.
It is however important to underline the role of the tutor in handling errors that also involve the whole healthcare structure and the professionals involved in education: a role which requires not only educational but also relational and organizational competences inasmuch as tutors are institutionally part of the context of the whole system. Errors in nursing education must be interpreted from the viewpoint of learning, but without forgetting that we must be guarantors of the safety of the patient who is always our priority.
