Proactive Nursing for Medication Safety: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study of Neonatal Intensive Care Nurses' Experiences of Initiating Medication Queries

For critical care nurses working in Neonatal Intensive Care Units, nurse-initiated medication queries are a key, yet fragile, safety barrier. Findings underscore the need for organisations to combine electronic decision-support with assertiveness and communication training, NICU-specific workload optimisation, and ethically oriented debriefing and supervision. System-level changes targeting safety culture and hierarchical barriers are essential to sustaining proactive medication safety behaviours among NICU nurses.