One scenario in which access to data would be instrumental focuses on a hospital network’s frequent encounters with negative feedback from inpatients related to communication with care professionals. To reveal the key source of discontent by instrumentalizing the right data, all participating hospitals might initiate data collection events targeted at recently discharged patients. The data to use for decision-making and deciding on new workforce education policies might include patient-reported experiences with care. Such data would be collected anonymously using the Patient Satisfaction with Nursing Care Quality Questionnaire; patients would be supposed to complete the electronic tool during the discharge procedure (Claro, 2022; Lotfi et al., 2019). The nineteen-item tool produces data on patient-perceived care quality in various domains, including attention, respect, sensitivity to care recipients’ needs, and other communication-related skills (Claro, 2022; Lotfi et al., 2019). The tool would also capture general demographic details, such as ethnicity and age. A nurse leader (NL) would then access raw data for the entire network in an Excel database and use it as a decision-making resource by processing it and searching for consistent trends.
The NL would be able to derive instrumental and quality-enhancing knowledge from patient satisfaction data. For instance, the average patient’s low satisfaction with nurse competency would reveal the need for continuous training or enhanced control by nurse supervisors (Lotfi et al., 2019). Suboptimal satisfaction with nurses’ demonstration of respect and kindness, especially if more common in ethnic minority patients, would generate the NL’s understanding of the need for diversity and cultural competency training. To form knowledge from such information, the NL would also have to use clinical judgment/reasoning or refer to clinical facts and patient evaluation knowledge (Delle et al., 2023). For instance, understanding that geriatric clients with neurological conditions might be more demanding when it comes to behaviors, the NL might need to avoid taking all low scores as evidence of skill deficiencies. In a similar manner, experiences with minority patients might explain the role of culture-specific understandings of courtesy, including personal space norms, in overall satisfaction scores. Therefore, looking at the data through the prism of actual clinical knowledge would be essential.
References
Claro, Q. K. C. (2022). Patient satisfaction with nursing care quality in affiliated hospitals of an educational institution. Technium: Social Sciences Journal, 29, 138-161. Web.
Delle, J. M., Cross, L., Weaver, A., & Jessee, M. A. (2023). Evolving the assessment of clinical judgment: An individual or collective competency?Nurse Educator, 48(2), 76-81. Web.
Lotfi, M., Zamanzadeh, V., Valizadeh, L., & Khajehgoodari, M. (2019). Assessment of nurse-patient communication and patient satisfaction from nursing care. Nursing Open, 6(3), 1189-1196. Web.