NURS FPX6016 Assessment 2 Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation

Context

Assessment 2 - Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation

Student Name
NURS FPX6016
Capella University
Prof Name
Month Date, Year

Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation

Hello everyone, this is Melanie Tromblee and today we are going to discuss quality improvement evaluation. This presentation will highlight the importance of nurses in the healthcare sector for quality improvement (QI) and interprofessional collaboration among all the units in a hospital for providing quality care delivery and improving patient satisfaction in healthcare especially targeting patient falls. Initiatives for improving quality are crucial to enhancing public health and bringing down the cost of medical treatment. In order to monitor QI targeted at tasks in clinical settings that are underperforming, dashboards must be used responsibly. Collaboration and cooperation among healthcare providers are crucial to enacting reforms that can enhance health outcomes.

Quality Improvement Initiative

The nursing staff’s problem-solving skills and creating strategies, including their abilities and experience to evaluate outcomes and performances, are frequently what determine the quality of care. Cooperation and coordination among staff and other departments are intended to provide direction to employees and members of the public in order to strengthen continuous QI initiatives. The presentation aims to assist the teams of medical workers and nursing staff in developing knowledge that can be coupled with their abilities to enhance patient outcomes and lower medical expenses. Our leadership’s commitment to enhancing medical safety is expanding, and as previously reported, they tried to ensure that activities mainly targeting QI assisted nursing staff in reducing blame-shifting along with identifying undesired incidences to enhance care delivery and healthcare outcomes.

Medical Case Study

For instance, continuous quality measures involve lowering possible risks of patient falls in the hospital. These are some of the metrics used to assess whether a hospital is offering safer healthcare services at the moment and of these metrics is recording and analyzing the ratio of patient falls. Our healthcare facility has seen an upsurge in patient falls in recent years, particularly among the elderly. To prevent potential discomfort of patients and shorten their hospital stays, safe procedures were to be followed. Such actions can prevent improper usage of medical products and medications. Furthermore, this can be concluded from the patient-centered priorities that individuals are highly regarded in such continuing projects along with selecting the best choices for patients in terms of effectiveness and management. Since the advances in medicine and technology, numerous scholars and healthcare experts have made sure that healthcare agencies in the US have improved in terms of performance. For an instance, if nursing staff prioritize practice delivery and patient safety, the standard of practices in the healthcare facility alters to assure survival outcomes and reduce healthcare costs for patients by implementing cost-effective strategies (Koonin et al., 2020).

The facility employed performance indicators, like data analysis, to lower the rate of falls causing serious injuries or in some cases trauma and provide better clinical care in all the units of the hospital. These activities make sure that the facility or hospital is providing patients along with their family’s exceptional support and assistance. Other QI initiatives that are implemented and adapted are the installation of bed alarms (Johnston & Magnan, 2019) along with adapting the 4 P’s approach i.e., pain, position, placement, and personal needs in hourly rounds (Althobaiti, 2019).

Medical Case Study

Evaluating the Success of Quality Improvement Initiative

The procedure of evaluating, as per the benchmarks criteria, includes assessing how to improve guidelines, policies, and practices and contrasting the efficacy of measures for enhancing care delivery. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, it was seen that various healthcare facilities were not equipped enough in terms of hospital resources and interprofessional collaboration. There has been an increase in demands for improved care delivery, and patient safety (Zhang & Shaw, 2020). The healthcare workers’ quality initiative has helped to cut down on the number of patient falls significantly. The hospital aimed at reducing patient falls to 3 as the average number of falls recorded monthly was 7 to 8. 

Over time, the healthcare system has evolved dramatically, enabling our healthcare teams to make judgments using health information. Utilizing evidence-based strategies to over underperformances of a hospital, and the quantities of information were greatly expanded using electronic health records (EHR) and applications, demonstrating the importance of technological innovation that is the future of every domain. This aided our healthcare facility in streamlining, securing, and mass data storage. The aim of including the IT department in coordinated care and collaboration to enhance the reporting and maintenance of EHR is the finest representation of a quality initiative to identify the causes of patient falls, degree of injury, and how quickly it was reported (Parrish et al., 2019). This has aided our specialists in the facility in enhancing and improving coordinated care between caregivers, patients, and their relatives or family. Similarly, implementing the 4 P’s approach is adopted by a variety of caregivers and healthcare teams of patients to reduce falls and foster a sense where the patient is checked in on and their requirements are satisfied throughout the day on hourly rounds. The facility was able to accomplish the following aims because of the framework used as a QI initiative:

medical ethics woman
  1. Installing bed alarms for patients.
  2. Providing patient-centered treatment and management plans to patients through the 4 P’s approach. 
  3. Delivering efficient care and CBT to patients experiencing trauma due to falls.
  4. Evaluate and (if necessary) withdrawal of “main causative” drugs linked to a higher risk of falling, particularly psychiatric drugs. 
  5. Personal hygiene management practices include frequently providing assistance with using the washroom.
  6. A thorough history is taken in order to identify the probable cause of the collapse, as well as secondary prevention, during a post-fall evaluation.
  7. Implementing EHR for minimizing the reporting duration and providing coordinated care to patients receiving medical services.

Interprofessional Perspective

There have also been specific aspects of doubt as well as information gaps concerning the interdisciplinary approach of efforts. The 4P Approach allows the care team as a whole to collaborate. Spend a moment checking in on the residents, attending to any concerns that are discovered, or informing personnel of the requirements of the hospitalized patient. Also by implementing EHR, the care coordination assisted our nursing staff and healthcare professionals to reduce reporting errors or reporting durations when it was strengthened in our facility. Additionally, it promoted improved results, which decreased expenses and enhanced the patients’ experiences in all the departments along with increasing hospital stays.

By decreasing inefficiencies in the system, the healthcare facility was also able to save valuable clinical resources (Müller et al., 2022). Nevertheless, other areas of ambiguity turned into obstacles for the caregivers, including a poor understanding of respective tasks along with apprehension about connecting with patients’ family’s in different languages, causing communication barriers. There’s been a learning gap in terms of managing and using IT tools. Healthcare providers need to attend courses linked to understanding program usage and fixing fundamental internet difficulties such as network connections and equipment malfunctioning to achieve improved positive results (Burton et al., 2022)

Doctors communication

Additional Recommendations

 It is important to increase patient education regarding the effective use of bedside alarms. Its continuous use can help significantly with minimizing the cases of bed alarms and warning the nurses regarding the possible chances of patient mobility (Cuttler et al., 2017). Health systems must ensure the use of a reliable reporting system that will aid in identifying potential issues that could result in a higher number of patient falls. To ensure that patients from all backgrounds take part in preventing falls, all those involved in raising awareness should work to create an environment in the culturally competent healthcare facility. Furthermore, to enable accurate and thorough patient assessments, healthcare personnel should be skilled in using assessment methods. Additionally, Management might explore automated insurance payments to cut down on client financing expenses. By distributing adequate support and funds to the selected patients and automating administrative processes, incorporating an extra strategy to achieve the cost-effective objective can be helpful (Chandra et al., 2022).

The facility can also utilize the BATHE procedure. The tactic is effective for establishing a connection with patients and calming them down. The method’s primary objective is to convince patients and allay their worries. The strategy has also been found to significantly improve ambulatory situations and their overall experiences while increasing patient experience (Chengappa et al., 2020). This will help healthcare providers to understand the condition of patients, their background, the problems patients are dealing with, prioritize and needs of patients regarding management and treatment plan, and lastly the empathetic response of the healthcare team to enhance communication which will help in the effective use of bed alarms along with the better adaptation of 4 P’s understanding the needs and requirements of patients and involving patients in their treatment.

Conclusion

Quality improvement initiative aimed at providing quality care and patient safety. This was achieved by the implementation of the 4 Ps approach and implementing bedside alarms for providing healthcare access. The performance of the hospital was also analyzed using benchmark metrics to work on the underperformances to provide quality care and management to patients experiencing falls. Interprofessional collaboration was also highlighted for implementing the initiative and achieving the goals with better outcomes but some gaps regarding awareness, knowledge, training of healthcare providers regarding the use of EHR, and communication barriers were also identified. These gaps can be overcome by implementing the modified approaches to strengthen the quality of care provided and improve patient satisfaction.

References

Burton, L., Rush, K. L., Smith, M. A., Davis, S., Rodriguez Echeverria, P., Suazo Hidalgo, L., & Görges, M. (2022). Empowering Patients Through Virtual Care Delivery: Qualitative Study With Micropractice Clinic Patients and Health Care Providers. JMIR Formative Research, 6(4), e32528. https://doi.org/10.2196/32528 

Chandra, M., Kumar, K., Thakur, P., Chattopadhyaya, S., Alam, F., & Kumar, S. (2022). Digital technologies, healthcare and Covid-19: insights from developing and emerging nations. Health and Technology, 12(2), 547–568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-022-00650-1 

Cuttler, S. J., Barr-Walker, J., & Cuttler, L. (2017). Reducing medical-surgical inpatient falls and injuries with videos, icons and alarms. BMJ Open Quality, 6(2), e000119. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000119 

Chengappa, N., Rajkumar Honest, P. C., David, K., Pricilla, R. A., Rahman, S. M., & Rebecca, G. (2020). Effect of BATHE interview technique on patient satisfaction in an ambulatory family medicine centre in South India. Family Medicine and Community Health, 8(4), e000327. https://doi.org/10.1136/fmch-2020-000327 

Johnston, M., & Magnan, M. A. (2019). Using a Fall Prevention Checklist to Reduce Hospital Falls: Results of a Quality Improvement Project. AJN, American Journal of Nursing, 119(3), 43–49. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.naj.0000554037.76120.6a 

Koonin, L. M., Hoots, B., Tsang, C. A., Leroy, Z., Farris, K., Jolly, B., Antall, P., McCabe, B., Zelis, C. B. R., Tong, I., & Harris, A. M. (2020). Trends in the Use of Telehealth During the Emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, January–March 2020. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(43), 1595–1599. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6943a3 

Müller, J., Reardon, C., Coetzee, F., Bester, J., Dube, K., Hanekom, S., du Plessis, E., & Couper, I. (2022). Transformative learning through participation: experiences at a rural clinical training site in South Africa. BMC Medical Education, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03233-w 

‌ Parrish, R. H., Gilak, L., Bohannon, D., Emrick, S. P., Serumaga, B., & Guharoy, R. (2019). Minimizing Medication Errors from Electronic Prescription Transmission—Digitizing Compounded Drug Preparations. Pharmacy, 7(4), 149. https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmacy7040149 

Zhang, H., & Shaw, R. (2020). Identifying Research Trends and Gaps in the Context of COVID-19. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3370. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17103370