Using intentional forced errors to build clinical judgment

What if many healthcare errors begin long before a mistake becomes visible? And what if learning to recognize those hidden influences could transform how nurses think, lead, and advocate for patient safety?

In this episode of Lippincott Spark, host Dr. Kelly Dries sits down with Dr. Annette Severson, critical care nurse, educator, and author of the medical suspense novel Forced Errors, to explore how storytelling can help nursing students move beyond checklists and develop stronger clinical judgment.

Dr. Severson believes the biggest gap in nursing education isn't a lack of knowledge or technical skills. Instead, it's helping students interpret complex clinical situations as they unfold. In practice, patient care is constantly changing, and nurses must reassess information, recognize patterns, and adapt their decisions in real time. That's where storytelling comes in.

Through narrative immersion, students become active participants in realistic clinical situations that challenge them to ask deeper questions: What is really happening here? What assumptions am I making? What clues might I be missing? Like a suspense novel, clinical practice often requires nurses to follow the most likely explanation while remaining open to new information that could change their understanding.

The conversation also highlights the importance of systems thinking. Rather than viewing errors as isolated mistakes, Dr. Severson demonstrates how workflow pressures, communication challenges, hierarchy, organizational culture, and even everyday tools such as electronic health records can influence patient outcomes.

By exploring these dynamics through story, learners strengthen clinical judgment, build emotional intelligence, and better understand how systems influence patient outcomes.

For educators, narrative immersion offers a flexible teaching strategy that can complement existing approaches such as simulation, case studies, and reflection activities. Dr. Severson shows that even a single chapter or short narrative can spark meaningful discussion, helping students connect leadership, communication, and clinical reasoning to real-world practice.

Her closing advice to nurse educators is simple: give students more opportunities to sit with curiosity before rushing to the answer. Developing sound clinical judgment requires more than knowing what to do. It requires learning how to make sense of uncertainty.

For nurse educators looking to move beyond memorization and task completion, storytelling offers a powerful way to help students think, question, and reason like nurses before they enter practice.

Listen to the full Spark Podcast episode with Dr. Annette Severson to discover how storytelling and narrative immersion can help students strengthen clinical judgment, navigate uncertainty, uncover hidden contributors to error, and think more deeply about patient safety.