As nurses, we care passionately about the care we give and continually seek ways to improve and demonstrate our value. We have embraced the quality agenda as an opportunity to demonstrate our continued value and impact on patient care, wherever we deliver our care. Healthcare's focus on high-quality care gives nurses the opportunity to articulate what we do. When implementing new quality measures, we have had to identify, analyze and tell the stories of our nursing roles and their impact on patients' experiences, the enhancement of our safety measures and the effectiveness of our practices. We have needed to apply and utilize tested tools, change techniques and adopt best practices to ensure successful patient outcomes.
Regulatory agencies and national initiatives will continue to demand — and drive improvements for — quality healthcare. In our commitment to provide evidence-based care, we will need to continue to investigate research results and best practices, question how we do things, and develop innovative ways to support our clinical outcomes while focusing on promoting, enhancing and maintaining the health and well-being of our patients.
We manage the environment for our patients 24/7. It is our responsibility to be the patient's advocate. We are direct participants in the delivery of therapeutic care to our patients. Certainly, the ability to provide safe, high-quality care has become more multifaceted than it was in the past, and the diseases that our patients are presenting with have become more complex. However, high-quality care will continue to be a significant priority for nursing, requiring interdisciplinary coordination perhaps across departments and systems. As we adopt new practices, one of our challenges should also be to reduce waste and remove unnecessary duplication within our processes.
Many of you have been leaders in quality-improvement projects in your departments and/or organizations. How are you evaluating your outcomes? What types of data are being collected and monitored by your organization? What types of systems are you using to monitor your improvements and care initiatives?
Quality improvement initiatives need the support of nurses to achieve their aims, but most nurses don't have time to read reports about how their individual departments are progressing. Many organizations, however, are utilizing quality data dashboards to communicate information throughout organizations and have customized individual unit data and organizational objectives. At my hospital site, we have aligned our indicators with our strategic goals. Some of our monitored indicators are common across all department dashboards, such as pain management and patient satisfaction. However, some specific departments also choose indicators that pertain to their unique patient population. Their indicator objectives may be chosen through specific methods, such as examining national benchmarks or conducting literature reviews, to determine best practices. Most organizations are also monitoring indicators within the National Patient Safety Goals, such as falls, medication errors, pressure ulcers, hospital-acquired pneumonia, pain management, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, hospital-acquired surgical site infections and/or hand-hygiene practices. We color-code our dashboards so that the indicators may be highlighted in red, yellow, or green, providing instant feedback on our quality performance measures. In this way, our staff needs to take only a quick glance to see how the organization and their units are performing. If goals are met, the indicator may be green, but if the goal is not met, an eye-catching red will be evident. Thus, at a glance, nurses are able to see how they are doing.
Quality is at the heart of everything we do for our patients. As nurses, we play a vital role in achieving the high quality of care that our patients expect. We can deliver consistently safe and effective patient-centered care only with the full involvement of all nurses and the entire healthcare team. To achieve those goals, let us foster learning and sharing! We can learn from one another by sharing our successes, barriers, and key strategies for quality initiatives and practice changes. We learned from one another at our National Conference this past April. We learn from one another by sharing through our Journal. Share your quality outcomes, initiatives, case studies, and practice changes with us. We look forward to hearing from you!
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