Introduction
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement is one of the largest organizations within the United States (US) that affects change in the health environment. The organization offers training courses to personnel in the medical profession at global and community levels. Thus, this analytical treatise attempts to explicitly review the role of nurses in the Institutes for Healthcare Improvement activities.
Role of Nurses in Effecting Change
Enormous increase in health care costs is increasingly becoming a concern to government, corporate as well as personal budgets. Draper et .al (2008) revealed that the health care expenditures have increased by an average of two percent higher than the growth of GDP for the past fifty years. The underlying concern is that if this trend continues, health care expenditure is likely to consume more than twenty-percent of government expenditure in most countries by 2050.
The trends in government expenditure are disturbing. However, this organization promotes efficiency in service delivery, hence reducing the cost of services at health facilities. Since nurses have a primary contact with the patients, participation on the efficiency management at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement organization will greatly reduce the unnecessary costs such as wastages and misuse of health provision instruments (Draper et al. 2008).
The general agreement is that wellness programs run by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement have profound positive benefits to both the administration and patients. Through these initiatives, patients have the opportunity to live happier, healthier, longer and more productive lives.
Being the most important assets to an organization, improved productivity of health institutions presents a bundle of benefits to the administration. The development and implementation of wellness programs and health programs is initiated and managed by nurses. As a result of involvement of nurses in this change process, hospitals and other health facilities are likely to experience dramatic shift from a culture of treatment to prevention (Jennings et al. 2007).
When developing records management mechanisms, numbers of setbacks befall health program providers. Data storage has become a complex element in records keeping. This problem is further complicated by merger of health facility departments and integrated health delivery services.
Fortunately, the records management and treatment skill offered by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement equips nurses with the relevant skills of micro managing records especially in the remote health facilities. Thus, a nurse involved in the records management course offered by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement will have necessary expertise in professional records management of patients (Draper et al. 2008).
The concept of leadership can be broadly defined as the intrinsic ability to internalize a setting with the intention of empowering a group or team to proactively and creatively contribute towards problem solving.
On the other hand, management, in the broad spectrum, can be defined as the process in an organization that is inclusive of setting, strategic planning, managing resources and deploying the needed resources to realize specific objectives that are measurable within a specified period of time. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement encourages nurses to offer primary leadership and management skills in implementing changes through the participatory approach (Jennings et al. 2007).
Conclusion
Leadership inspires the need to contribute proactively towards creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between a challenge and its solution. A nurse participating in the change activities of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement may offer creative leadership which is a rich recipe for an imaginative response to stimulation. The stimulation creates a wider chain of adaptation of viable solutions when implementing change in the healthcare environment.
References
Draper, D. A., Felland, L. E., Liebhaber, A., & Melichar, L. (2008). The role of nurses in hospital quality improvement. Web.
Jennings, B., Baily, A., Bottrell, M., & Lynn, J. (2007). Health care quality improvement: Ethical and regulatory issues. Web.