Introduction
Quality outcomes and patient measures are essential in the healthcare industry. It is so because the two relate to what service patients receive and whether medical settings provide individuals with harmful factors. This assignment will create and describe a healthcare entity, mention the entity’s successes and failures, introduce a safety measure to be improved by nursing science, determine potential obstacles, and identify stakeholders for collaboration.
Describing a Healthcare Entity
This assignment focuses on a hypothetical acute care hospital in an urban area. It provides numerous services, including emergency care, acute care surgery, critical care, and others. Since it has 160 beds, this hospital is considered medium-sized. It is a non-profit hospital that offers its services to improve public health. The setting has been operating for five years to serve citizens of a single community. Thus, the following sections will comment on how quality outcomes and safety measures are represented in the hospital.
Healthcare Entity’s Successes and Failures
It is reasonable to rely on specific quality outcomes to determine the areas where the hospital under analysis is successful. A nurse-patient ratio is a significant indicator among these outcomes since it demonstrates whether patients receive a sufficient amount of care and considers the organization’s cost-effectiveness (Qureshi et al., 2019). Numerous scholarly articles focus on the nurse-patient ratio, and Wynendaele et al. (2019) claim that a 4:1 rate is considered optimal in acute care hospitals. This correlation means that a single nurse should take care of no more than four patients simultaneously. Since the hospital’s staff includes 40 nurses, it means the healthcare setting will not witness any nurse-patient ratio issues under current conditions. Furthermore, this state of affairs also contributes to the fact that the hospital faces reduced patient turnaround times. Consequently, one can suppose that the healthcare entity is successful in providing patients with sufficient and adequate care.
However, the hospital cannot impress with such positive results when it comes to patient safety measures. As has been mentioned in the Part One assignment, these measures are “state policy, diagnosis, medications, surgical operations, infections, and injuries” (Ismail, 2017, p. 592). They cover many spheres that can be sources of a dangerous impact on people. Butcher (2018) argues that injurious falls and contract infections are typical issues in the acute care setting. It denotes that such hospitals do not provide their patients with safe environments to ensure that individuals are not subject to harmful effects. The healthcare setting under analysis is not an exception because its patients frequently suffer from these issues. This information demonstrates that the hospital’s failures refer to the fact that it does not provide patients with a safe environment that would protect them from infections and injuries.
Improving the Safety Measure through Nursing Science
Since it has been stated that contract infections and injurious falls represent the hospital’s failures, it is reasonable to consider how nursing science can impact them. Firstly, patient falls and resulting injuries are dependent variables, while appropriate fall reduction guidelines, tools, and interventions are independent ones. Thus, nursing science is capable of identifying what independent variables can lead to the reduced number of patient falls in the hospital under analysis. Many scholarly and peer-reviewed articles focus on this issue, and William’s (2020) study is among them. The author has conducted research to identify whether it is possible to eliminate patient falls “by implementing a customized set of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) patient fall reduction guidelines” (William, 2020, p. 210). This article is an example that nursing science has sufficient data and can impact the issue of patient falls and injuries. This information denotes that the hospital can use one of the existing interventions to reduce the spread of the problem among its patients, and nursing science explains how to cope with the task.
Secondly, contract infections are another safety measure that can be impacted through nursing science. Since an acute care hospital is considered a setting vulnerable to infections, it should have numerous variables that contribute to this issue. They are environmental cleanliness, entity culture, staffing and resource issues, infection control measures, and others (Bail et al., 2020). All these variables are independent, meaning that their presence or absence influences whether infections are prevalent among patients. Thus, nursing science can be useful to analyze whether the hospital under analysis suffers from any of the issues above. Its theoretical foundations allow assessing the situation, while practical concepts can demonstrate how the hospital can minimize the adverse effects of all the variables. Consequently, it is possible to suppose that nursing science can improve hospital safety measures.
Determining Potential Obstacles
One should admit that implementing the safety measures can imply essential barriers. As for preventing falls and reducing the number of injuries, the obstacles are the lack of effective strategies, resources, and time (Ayton et al., 2017). Ev Even though nursing science offers numerous theoretical guidelines on improving the situation, healthcare entities can have problems locating and following them. Furthermore, environmental factors and patient complexity also contribute to challenges when it comes to implementing safety measures (Ayton et al., 2017). It is so because these barriers can create the feeling that patient falls and, consequently, injuries are inevitable events. This belief makes it more challenging to take appropriate actions to improve safety within the healthcare entity.
Simultaneously, the process of implementing a safety measure to address contract infections also implies some obstacles. Difficult working conditions represent the first barrier because long shifts and heavy workload make it challenging for the hospital staff to abide by infection prevention requirements (Clack et al., 2018). These issues contribute to the fact that medical professionals ignore safety guidelines, which promotes infection spread. Furthermore, the lack of material resources to prevent diseases from developing among patients is another obstacle (Clack et al., 2018). This fact stipulates that financial issues also play a crucial role in determining how infections are addressed in a medical setting. It means that insufficient resources subject patients to a higher risk of experiencing infectious diseases. Since these potential obstacles have been identified, nursing science can offer efficient ways to mitigate their effect.
Identifying Stakeholders
Dealing with safety measures is a challenging process, and collaboration can be a significant supporting element. That is why it is necessary to determine stakeholders who can positively contribute to the process. Firstly, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of cooperating with nurses when it comes to addressing quality and safety issues. It is so because these medical professionals directly work with patients. That is why they fully understand patients’ needs and requirements. In turn, this knowledge allows nurses to estimate the situation at the site and offer some valuable comments regarding possible improvements. It means that the collaboration with these stakeholders is of significance when the task is to implement safety measures and provide patients with a more favorable environment that will lead to their better health outcomes.
Secondly, it is also reasonable to cooperate with representatives of leadership roles. It is so because efficient leadership is considered an enabler of some safety measures (Ayton et al., 2017). That is why it is necessary to establish good relationships with chief clinicians and hospital administration. Collaboration with these stakeholders is essential because they can make decisions that can significantly influence the way how the hospital approaches its quality and safety measures. Thus, this information has demonstrated that the process under consideration requires multi-level support to ensure that the proposed steps lead to positive consequences.
Conclusion
The assignment has demonstrated how quality and safety measures can be applied to a hypothetical acute care hospital. The healthcare entity’s analysis has revealed that the nurse-patient ratio and patient turnaround times are its quality successes, while frequent infections and injuries represent safety failures. That is why the appropriate section has explained how nursing science can affect the identified inefficiencies. The solutions refer to the fact that science can provide the hospital with useful data on locating the specific guidelines or interventions and implementing them. Furthermore, potential obstacles, including the lack of resources, environmental factors, difficult working conditions, and others, have also been addressed because they can negatively affect safety measures. Finally, the paper has stated that it is essential to collaborate with nurses, chief clinicians, and hospital administration because these are significant stakeholders who can improve the implementation process.
References
Ayton, D. R., Barker, A. L., Talevski, J., Morello, R. T., Brand, C. A., Hill, K. D., & The 6-PACK Investigator Team. (2017). Barriers and enablers to effective falls prevention in acute hospitals.Innovation in Aging, 1(1), 651. Web.
Bail, K., Willis, E., Henderson, J., Blackman, I., Verrall, C., & Roderick, A. (2020). Missed infection control care and healthcare associated infections: A qualitative study. Collegian. Web.
Butcher, L. (2018). Caring for patients with dementia in the acute care setting. British Journal of Nursing, 27(7). Web.
Clack, L., Zingg, W., Saint, S., Casillas, A., Touveneau, S., Jantarada, F. d. L., Willi, U., van der Kooi, T., Damschroder, L. J., Foman, J. H., Harrod, M., Krein, S., Pittet, D., & Sax, H. (2018). Implementing infection prevention practices across European hospitals: An in-depth qualitative assessment.BMJ Quality & Safety, 27, 771-780. Web.
Ismail, M. N. b. I. (2017). Patient safety and its components. Patient Safety & Quality Improvement Journal, 5(4), 592-593.
Qureshi, S. M., Purdy, N., Beng, A. M., & Neumann, W. P. (2019). Predicting the effect of nurse-patient ratio on nurse workload and care quality using discrete event simulation. Journal of Nursing Management, 27, 971-980. Web.
William, G. Z. (2020). Translational nursing science: Implementation of a patient fall reduction strategy in the emergency department at a community-based medical center. Open Access Journal of Biomedical Science, 1(5), 210-215. Web.
Wynendaele, H., Willems, R., & Trybou, J. (2019). Systematic review: Association between the patient-nurse ration and nurse outcomes in acute care hospitals.Journal of Nursing Management, 1-22. Web.