nursing educational level (Aiken et al. 2003), nursing
turnover (Bae et al. 2010) and an inability to carry out
caring tasks (Schubert et al. 2009). As a whole, these
studies revealed that nursing competence is highly relevant
to patient safety. To improve nursing competence
in care, the Taiwan Nurses Association designed and
implemented the nursing accreditation system in 1992.
This system evaluates nursing capabilities and uses N1
(or N0) to denote the primary level and N4 to denote
the most advanced level. Nursing accreditation criteria
include job tenure, book reviews, case analyses, care
reports, administrative studies, and caring skills and
ethics (Taiwan Nurses Association 2010). Nursing
accreditation has been implemented for 19 years, but
no studies were found that examined the correlation
between level of nursing accreditation and patient
safety performance. This lack reflects a knowledge gap
and efforts to close this gap can provide novel means for
improving patient safety and can contribute to global
nursing practices. This study aimed to investigate
whether nursing accreditation is related to patient
safety.