Patient safety has always been an important issue. Patients come into contact with nurses more than any other hospital staff. Therefore, nurses play a crucial role in patient safety. The objective of this study is to understand the nurses' cognition and implementation of patient safety policies, including the eight goals. This study used structured questionnaires to conduct the purposive sample survey. 200 questionnaires were sent out and 191 effective ones were collected, yielding a response rate of 95.5 %. The findings were as follows: (1) The majority of nurses lacked understanding of the relevant safety policies. Concerning the rate of implementing the eight goals, "encouraging the annunciation of unexceptional events" and "enhancing the public participation in patient safety" were the lowest; (2) The older and more senior the nurses were, the lower "improving the surgery's accuracy" and "encouraging the annunciation of exceptional events" were; (3) The more senior the nurses were, the less frequent their implementation of "carrying out the infection control in the hospital" was. These findings may be used as a reference for any educational institution, medical organizations or the government agency seeking for improvement of patient safety.