To successfully prepare for your assessment, you will need to complete the following preparatory activities:
- Select a single nursing-sensitive quality indicator that you see as important to a selected type of health care system. Choose from the following list:
- Staffing measures.
- Nursing hours per patient day.
- RN education/certification.
- Skill mix.
- Nurse turnover.
- Nursing care hours in emergency departments, perioperative units, and perinatal units.
- Skill mix in emergency departments, perioperative units, and perinatal units.
- Quality measures.
- Patient falls.
- Patient falls with injury.
- Pressure ulcer prevalence.
- Health care-associated infections.
- Catheter-associated urinary tract infection.
- Central line catheter associated blood stream infection.
- Ventilator-associated pneumonia.
- Ventilator- associated events.
- Psychiatric physical/sexual assault rate.
- Restraint prevalence.
- Pediatric peripheral intravenous infiltration rate.
- Pediatric pain assessment, intervention, reassessment (air) cycle.
- Falls in ambulatory settings.
- Pressure ulcer incidence rates from electronic health records.
- Hospital readmission rates.
- RN satisfaction survey options.
- Job satisfaction scales.
- Job satisfaction scales – short form.
- Practice environment scale.
- Staffing measures.
- Conduct independent research on the most current information about the selected nursing-sensitive quality indicator.
- Interview a professional colleague or contact who is familiar with quality monitoring and how technology can help to collect and report quality indicator data. You do not need to submit the transcript of your conversation, but do integrate what you learned from the interview into the audio tutorial. Consider these questions for your interview:
- What is your experience with collecting data and entering it into a database?
- What challenges have you experienced?
- How does your organization share with the nursing staff and other members of the health care system the quality improvement monitoring results?
- What role do bedside nurses and other frontline staff have in entering the data? For example, do staff members enter the information into an electronic medical record for extraction? Or do they enter it into another system? How effective is this process?
For this assessment, imagine you are a member of a Quality Improvement Council at any type of health care system, whether acute, ambulatory, home health, managed care, et cetera. Your Council has identified that newly hired nurses would benefit from comprehensive training on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators. The Council would like the training to address how this information is collected and disseminated across the organization. It would also like the training to describe the role nurses have in accurate reporting and high-quality results.
The Council indicates a recording is preferable to a written fact sheet due to the popularity of audio blogs. In this way, new hires can listen to the tutorial on their own time using their phone or other device.
As a result of this need, you offer to create an audio tutorial orienting new hires to these topics. You know that you will need a script to guide your audio recording. You also plan to incorporate into your script the insights you learned from conducting an interview with an authority on quality monitoring and the use of technology to collect and report quality indicator data.
You determine that you will cover the following topics in your audio tutorial script:
Introduction: Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicator
- What is the National Database of Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicators?
- What are nursing-sensitive quality indicators?
- Which particular quality indicator did you select to address in your tutorial?
- Why is this quality indicator important to monitor?
- Be sure to address the impact of this indicator on the quality of care and patient safety.
- Why do new nurses need to be familiar with this particular quality indicator when providing patient care?
Collection and Distribution of Quality Indicator Data
- According to your interview and other resources, how does your organization collect data on this quality indicator?
- How does the organization disseminate aggregate data?
- What role do nurses play in supporting accurate reporting and high-quality results?
- As an example, consider the importance of accurately entering data regarding nursing interventions.
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and scoring guide criteria:
- Competency 1: Describe nurses’ and the interdisciplinary team’s role in informatics with a focus on electronic health information and patient care technology to support decision making.
- Describe the interdisciplinary team’s role in collecting and reporting quality indicator data to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports.
- Competency 2: Evaluate the impact of patient care technologies on desired outcomes.
- Explain how a health care organization uses nursing-sensitive quality indicators to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports.
- Competency 3: Recommend the use of a technology to enhance quality and safety standards for patients.
- Justify how a nursing-sensitive quality indicator establishes evidence-based practice guidelines for nurses to follow when using patient care technologies to enhance patient safety, satisfaction, and outcomes.
- Competency 4: Apply professional, scholarly communication to facilitate use of health information and patient care technologies.
- Deliver a professional, effective audio tutorial on a selected quality indicator that engages new nurses and motivates them to accurately report quality data in a timely fashion.
- Follow APA style and formatting guidelines for citations and references.