Introduction
One of the main reasons why quality improvement initiatives have to be considered essential within the framework of healthcare is that they give patients an opportunity to experience high-quality care while communicating their concerns to team members. The concept of patient-centered care can also be nurtured via quality improvement activities, which means that team members must first be aware of the present issues (Barrett, 2018). Any potential errors and misconceptions affecting care provision can be addressed with the help of successful quality improvement initiatives aimed at developing a plan that would involve all possible stakeholders. Perspectives on interprofessional collaboration cannot be ignored either because they deploy the foundation for proper allocation of employee responsibilities and promote effective communication (Homeyer et al., 2018; Turkelson et al., 2017). The more ideas there are to improve the quality of care, the more chances the team will have to find the right solution and allocate resources respectively.
The data collected within the framework of the current project is going to serve as underpinning evidence for further projects aimed at quality improvements. The author will gain insight into the essential weaknesses of Vila Health and propose a strategy to overcome these. Data regarding the strength of existing benchmarks are going to be utilized to reset safety and care quality goals. As long as Vila Health is not capable of meeting requirements linked to constant quality improvement, the organization will not receive any relevant reimbursements from the government (Bowblis & Roberts, 2020). This particular idea makes it crucial for Vila Health to investigate adverse event reporting across the facility and find the weakest links in the system. Overall, the rationale behind this quality improvement project is to implement an interprofessional perspective and engage all possible stakeholders in the process of enhancing patient care.
Data Analysis and Problem Statement
The current program provided by Vila Health offers inpatient admissions and in-home care. An interdisciplinary team focuses on patient comfort and addresses care from the point of psychological, emotional, and physical needs. The plan of care is always flexible and does not represent a fixed intervention that is repeated for different patients. Based on the information regarding adverse events that occurred between the years 2014 and 2015, it may be concluded that more detailed interventions are necessary if Vila Health expects to improve patient care and satisfaction. The current indicators obtained through the interface of observation include inappropriate symptom relief, incorrect pain management, and an unfitting length of stay. Ultimately, these three indicators are going to serve as the foundation for the quality improvement initiative intended to enhance patient care.
The total number of adverse events that were reported during 2014 and 2015 shows that Vila Health requires an instant intervention so that the staff would realize the need for improvements and share their ideas regarding possible updates. The increasing level of pain was balanced by reduced length of stay, but the problem of managing patients properly still remains since reporting procedures seem to be flawed. Without having access to detailed information, the organization is not going to achieve positive patient outcomes and maintain employee satisfaction (Plaku-Alakbarova et al., 2018). Symptom relief also represents a problem because the team has to ensure they provide timely support and administer appropriate care at all times. With so many issues with health indicators, it may be safe to claim that Vila Health currently experiences problems with care delivery that reflect the lack of preparedness, planning, and data analysis. Instead of working through the consequences, the team could focus on improving patient outcomes and preventing most of the negativity stemming from the large number of adverse events reported during 2014 and 2015.
Unfortunately, the existing improvements in the number of inpatient admissions and the decreased length of stay are not enough to conclude that Vila Health does not require any quality advances. With improper symptom management and ever-swelling pain levels across the organizational reports on various patients, it was reasonable to assume that the quality of care tangibly decreased over the year. There is also a chance that the Vila Health organization did not collect enough in-depth insights, leaving room for secondary indicators that contributed to much more evident issues related to symptom management and pain levels. Quality improvement initiatives require the administration to collect more data on the subject and ask for relevant feedback from team members and patients. Over time, the initiative would become more flexible and allow Vila Health employees to share valuable insights among themselves to seek answers inside detailed reports. For instance, the number of patients assigned and the level of experience of each of the nurses could be seen as key variables under review in the case of decreased quality of care.
Despite the limitations related to the quality of data obtained by Vila Health and restricted reporting from nurses, it may be essential for the organization to ask for more stakeholder feedback. Most active nurses do not have access to real-time updates and, therefore, cannot recognize any of the relevant issues when necessary. One possible way of improving the state of affairs could be to ask all staff members to report every single event with no exceptions and be as detailed about it as possible. This would strengthen the interconnectedness between staff members while providing them with additional insights linked to indicators of personal job performance (Cho & Han, 2018). At the moment, Vila Health does not feature a strong supporting system for nurses and stakeholders that could be utilized to share insights and motivate employees to speak out on the most prominent issues. Adverse event reports from 2014 and 2015 prove that the team does not apply the required metrics. Instead, the staff chooses to report in a picky manner, reducing their own chances of attaining a proper work-life balance and patient satisfaction.
Quality Improvement Proposal
The first evident issue that has to be addressed through the interface of quality improvement initiatives is the presence of adverse events reported during both 2014 and 2015. Scarce symptom management and high pain level benchmarks have to be included in Vila Health’s agenda to help the staff provide high-quality services while also creating room for patient satisfaction (Stacey et al., 2019). As suggested by Phillips et al. (2017), additional pain screenings could help the team improve operations and facilitate most of the problematic treatment processes. Therefore, patient outcomes have to be modified via quality improvement initiatives that would specifically address the issues of symptom management and pain levels. As long as the Vila Health team members are able to modify these two benchmarks, they will have the capability of improving hospital processes and enhancing the process of communication among nurses.
At the same time, the staff should pay closer attention to how it invests in technology and what kind of digital solutions are utilized to facilitate care provision. Even though there are several disadvantages that can be associated with telemedicine and its numerous derivatives, the overall idea should be that electronic health records and computers make patients’ and providers’ lives easier (Barrett, 2018). Within the framework of proposed quality improvement initiatives, the author suggests focusing on the role of technology and expanding it. With more staff members and patients interested in telehealth, the Vila Health organization is going to broaden its horizons and correct plentiful mistakes related to care provision and data analysis. The concern of reporting sensitive cases can also be addressed through technology since nurses will have a chance to translate their concerns into digital reports and make their contributions more tangible.
When looking into the information obtained within the framework of the current proposal, it is important to realize that there are at least two benchmarks that have to be improved in order to reduce the occurrence of adverse events at Vila Health. The advent of a large interprofessional team requires the organization to pay more attention to existing health standards and align its practices against preset benchmarks. The currently limited amount of resources allocated to Vila Health should not be seen as a disadvantage because staff members will have the opportunity to either accept or refuse certain proposals while voicing their own concerns in a detailed manner. The management could go even further and interview nurses and other care providers in addition to key stakeholders, to gain insight into their personal outlooks on quality improvement and recognize the best ways to implement change.
Interprofessional Perspectives
With the help of interprofessional perspectives, the Vila Health staff could engage in quality improvement initiatives that include the opinions and worldviews of multiple individuals. This diverse contribution is necessary because it gives a chance to team members to remain responsible while also inflicting transformations that bring real value (Homeyer et al., 2018). On the other hand, with insights from all possible care providers and stakeholders, the organization would have an opportunity to allocate resources and tasks adequately without having to cope with numerous instances of human error or miscommunication. Some of the roles that should be present in Vila Health’s quality improvement agenda are nurses, physicians, and executives.
Nurses, for example, will be required to manage patient care and closely collaborate with doctors. The latter will provide nurses with necessary orders and share valuable insights intended to facilitate the process of care. In line with the proposed quality improvement initiatives, nurses will be required to look into how they could improve the quality of care while also maintaining effective interprofessional relations (Murdoch et al., 2017). Speaking of physicians, their essential responsibility would be to manage patients’ pain and symptoms. They will communicate all the necessary information to nurses so that the latter would collect the required data and perform all the operations. Even though there were no data sets uncovering the failure of the Vila Health organization to deploy essential benchmarks, an interprofessional view of communication and patient care is going to reduce the number of delays (Homeyer et al., 2018). Additionally, the team could benefit from partnering with a social worker who would monitor patients and report any uncommon events or observations.
Profound respect for each role within the team is going to make an interprofessional perspective into the best possible contributor to a supportive environment where new ideas are generated daily. From the point of view of the Vila Health organization, this could be an opportunity to achieve cost-effective care and improve its quality of it by addressing pitfalls related to patient outcomes (Wei et al., 2020). Support provided from one staff member to another will become a crucial indicator of improved work-life quality and markers of possible corrections intended to enrich the proposed initiative. Individual proposals shared by nurses and physicians can directly impact the process of patient care and increase the value of personal contributions to team efforts. As long as all staff members represent valuable assets for the organization, they will perform in the best possible way and adhere to the directions listed by executives while sharing their outlooks with the remaining team as well (Dahl & Crawford, 2018; Murdoch et al., 2017). Overall, an interprofessional environment creates less stress and positively affects the quality of care. This could be a crucial addition to the current care environment and promoted benchmarks.
Communication Strategy
Without a complex communication strategy, the team will be rather likely to remain confused and miss the point behind the deployment of interprofessional care. In line with Turkelson et al. (2017), it would also be crucial to provide every team member with an opportunity to voice their concerns. Irrespective of the ideas mentioned by team members, communication should remain respectful at all times, with all the important notes being recorded and saved efficiently to be brought up at the right time. This peaceful, welcoming approach will motivate staff members to hold conversations more often and share their proposals with others. The Concern, Uncomfortable, and Safety issue (CUS) model could be utilized by the team to shape the further steps of the quality improvement initiative. The CUS is relatively easy to deploy since it only impacts the process of communication between team members and helps them evaluate each other’s ideas against personal criteria (Umoren et al., 2017). Every idea or hypothesis will be appraised from several angles to develop a bigger picture and make informed decisions.
Conclusion
Without respective quality improvement initiatives, it might be hard for a healthcare organization to maintain and improve the eminence of its services. The process of data collection should be as thorough as possible in order to provide the given organization with an opportunity to learn more about benchmarks to use and additional comparisons to make. At the same time, all the aspects of interprofessional collaboration have to be considered so that Vila Health could prevent the number of adverse events from increasing drastically. Quality improvement initiatives instigated by Vila Health could significantly benefit from supplementary benchmarks in addition to pain levels, symptom relief, inpatient admissions, and the length of stay. On the other hand, the chance to bring different care providers closer represents an opportunity to strengthen interprofessional collaboration and ensure that high-quality care is provided to all patients across the facility.
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