Introduction
Measures of effect are used in various healthcare aspects, such as evaluation of epidemiological research results, prevention strategies, and personnel’s quality of work. The approaches are necessary to be implemented in nursing practice to identify weak points, timely address the issues, and improve operations. Identifying benchmarks and comparing the outcomes to initiative purposes is crucial for revealing causality for correct decision-making in addressing healthcare challenges (Whitcomb & Naimi, 2021). This paper aims to discuss how the measure of effect strengthens and supports nursing practice and identify the risks of not using the assessment strategies.
How Measures of Effect Strengthen and Support Nursing Practice
Nursing contains a diverse range of daily activities to perform; therefore, their effectiveness must be evaluated for further optimization or elimination. Measures of effect are the indexes for summarizing the connection strength between actions and outcomes, which are helpful in daily decision-making (Friis & Sellers, 2021). Nurses can significantly strengthen their work if the causes of the solutions they apply could contain a measurable variable. While epidemiological studies evaluate how addressing risk factors influence disease rates, nursing practitioners can use a similar strategy to improve their interventions’ effectiveness. Furthermore, measures of absolute and relative effect can be exercised in several aspects of work simultaneously to calculate the overall score and develop strategies to support high rates (Friis & Sellers, 2021). Using the system in nursing practice is crucial for identifying specific causes of issues that threaten healthcare facilities’ performance and patients’ well-being.
Multiple studies have already been conducted to explore if measures of effect can be applied to strengthen nursing practice. For instance, Williams et al. conducted research where the nurses’ person-centered communication with dementia-affected patients was evaluated through a set of indexes to identify their approaches as effective (Williams et al., 2018). Scientists measured the effect of interactions with clients of 39 nursing assistants with behavioral, psycholinguistic, and emotional indexes (Williams et al., 2018). The results suggested that patients with dementia have better outcomes from person-centered communication. Nursing practice was strengthened as the findings led to changes in interaction approaches with clients to improve their treatment.
Another example of how the measurement of effect support nursing practice addresses how professionals deal with stressful conditions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Galli et al. studied the psychopathologic burden healthcare workers experienced during the virus outbreaks to measure the effect of specific mental health interventions (Galli et al., 2020). Researchers concluded that an absolute association exists between productivity and prolonged work in the frontier departments and that absence of psychological support is exceptionally severe (Galli et al., 2020). Applying measures of effect helped identify the most helpful practices for nursing practitioners to use in extreme circumstances.
Dangers of Not Using Measures of Effect in Nursing Practice
Nursing practice is a comprehensive set of interdependent activities, and issues of one work aspect can worsen the others. If no measures of effect were performed to assess nurses’ actions and decisions, the risk factor-outcome relationship would become impossible to discover and address when problems occur (Tripepi et al., 2010). The nursing practice during the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic is an example where lack of evaluation, benchmarks of quality, and decision-making control lead to mortality growth and disease outbreaks among personnel (Galli et al., 2020). Consequently, a measure of effect must be used to timely identify and address absolute and relative causes of nurse- or patient-related issues.
Conclusion
The measure of effect is a helpful tool for improving nursing practices from various aspects, and not implementing the strategy into the performance analysis has severe outcomes for practitioners, patients, and healthcare facilities. Establishing indexes to evaluate the connection between specific actions, circumstances, and outcomes is crucial for improving nurses’ performance. The measure of effect enables healthcare facilities to timely discover weak points and adjust nursing practice to maintain a high quality of their services.
References
Friis, R. H., & Sellers, T. A. (2021). Epidemiology for public health practice (6th ed.). Jones & Bartlett.
Galli, F., Pozzi, G., Ruggiero, F., Mameli, F., Cavicchioli, M., Barbieri, S., Canevini, M. P., Priori, A., Pravettoni, G., Sani., G., & Ferrucci, R. (2020). A systematic review and provisional metanalysis on psychopathologic burden on health care workers of coronavirus outbreaks. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 568664. Web.
Tripepi, G. Jager, K. J., Dekker, F. W. & Zoccali, C. (2010). Measures of effect in epidemiological research. Nephron Clinical Practice, 115(2), 91-93. Web.
Whitcomb, B. W., & Naimi, A. I. (2021). Defining, quantifying, and interpreting ‘noncollapsibility’in epidemiologic studies of measures of “effect.” American Journal of Epidemiology, 190(5), 697-700. Web.
Williams, K. N., Perkhounkova, Y., Jao, Y. L., Bossen, A., Hein, M., Chung, S., Starykowicz, A., & Turk, M. (2018). Person-centered communication for nursing home residents with dementia: Four communication analysis methods. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 40(7), 1012-1031. Web.