“It just makes me more grateful to be a nurse” -Kambrie Rankin
Kambrie Rankin, now in her fourth semester, was drawn to nursing because of its connection to Christlike service. "Serving others is a passion" of hers. During Kambrie’s first semester at BYU College of Nursing, Dr. Marie Prothero announced that she was looking for assistants for research on preventing nursing errors. Kambrie signed up, knowing that the research opportunity would help her become a better nurse, allowing her to serve more effectively.
For fellow student Amber Lawrence, now in her third semester, the research opportunity was also a chance to prepare for the future. "Being a new grad nurse, there will be lots of things you don't know," Amber said. "You want to learn as much as you can while you're in school."
After participating in this research for the past year, both Kambrie and Amber feel they are better equipped for their future careers.
Their research is centered on Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS)— “an evidence-based, proactive approach for addressing challenges in health care delivery and promoting a culture of safety.”
Inadequate communication, particularly during patient handovers, contributes to roughly 80% of adverse healthcare events. TeamSTEPPS was designed to address this communication gap by equipping nurses with structured tools like SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation), a method for clearly relaying patient information to providers, and "Check-Back," the practice of repeating information back to confirm accuracy. BYU College of Nursing has integrated these tools across coursework, clinical rotations, and simulation settings to better prepare graduates for the realities of practice.
Under the direction of BYU nursing faculty members Dr. Daphne Thomas, Dr. Marie Prothero, Dr. Stacie Hunsaker, and Dr. Michael Thomas, Amber and Kambrie gathered qualitative data by interviewing recent BYU nursing graduates about instances when they used TeamSTEPPS in the workplace. From there, they pored over the results to identify themes and patterns.
Several themes stuck out to Kambrie and Amber. Kambrie explained one of these themes: nurses who use TeamSTEPPS “feel confident in being able to use it because of the structured way that the tool sets up [communication], and they feel like doctors listen to them,” she said.
Another theme was the importance of Check-Back in preventing errors — particularly with medications that sound similar or are easily confused with others. Graduates consistently said the simple act of repeating information back to patients was one of the most practical and effective habits they carried from school into practice.
A third theme centered on simulation: graduates credited hands-on simulation training as the environment where they most clearly remembered learning and internalizing the tools.
One interview stood out vividly in Amber’s mind—the interviewee described a scenario where a patient was passed off to her by another nurse who had not been providing adequate care. “The patient was suffering,” Amber said. The interviewee said she used some of the TeamSTEPPS communication tools to assess the situation and then relay that information to the charge nurse and doctors to ensure that the patient received adequate care.
“She really used her communication to advocate for the patient, and that patient saw benefits because of it,”
Amber said.
For Amber, collaborating on this research reinforced the idea that communication tools are pivotal in ensuring patient safety and giving patients the best care possible. Which, according to Amber,
“is like advocating for them as Christ would.”
For Kambrie, the opportunity to be a part of this research had a somewhat unexpected impact on her: it helped her to be more forgiving. Conducting interviews allowed Kambrie to hear firsthand accounts of miscommunication and medical errors, leading her to conclude, “There are a lot of errors in healthcare…It taught me that everyone’s going to make a mistake no matter how good of a nurse you are.” She emphasized the importance of giving grace when a fellow medical professional makes a mistake, adding that “being Christlike is being kind and letting people learn and grow instead of punishing them.”
Reflecting on her experience, Kambrie expressed her gratitude for having the opportunity to work on this research, saying it taught her “what kind of nurse I want to be.” Both Kambrie and Amber will present their research findings alongside BYU faculty at the 2026 Sigma: Creating Healthy Work Environments conference on March 21st in Washington, D.C.