¶ … quality assessment is important in professional nursing practice. Besides being mandated, quality assessment ensures correct and safe nursing practices, and ensures the quality care of the patients in the facility. Performed quarterly, the quality assessment reviews patient care and involves nursing staff in the process, ensuring everyone has a say in the practices of the healthcare facility.
Quality assessment is essential in just about any professional practice, but it is especially important in the nursing, healthcare arena because the field is so dynamic. People come to healthcare facilities in need of care, and some may be life and death situations. They need to know that they can depend on the facility and its staff to give them the best care and treatment possible, and quality assessments help ensure this. Quality assessment should be about improving areas that need to be improved, not "catching" someone doing something wrong. They should identify areas where there may be a problem, and then discuss and implement solutions to those problems.
No healthcare facility is perfect, and quality assessment can help show where facilities and staff need to improve. Without quality assessment, things might be allowed to continue simply because they are not noticed or acted upon. With quality assessment, something that is questionable can be openly studied and discussed, and with the staff involved, there can be many creative solutions available for study and discussion, leading to more creative solutions for the problems.
A good quality assessment program will not attempt to solve all the problems it discovers, either. Instead, it will involve the different departments and staff members in those departments to come up with their own solutions. This way, the quality assessment committee is not overburdened, and the staff feels as if they have input and discussion in their own problems and difficulties. In addition, staff may not be aware that certain situations are prevalent throughout the facility, and when they understand this, they can work together to find ways to remedy the situation. For example, a facility may experience a high number of bedsores in patients because they are not moving them frequently enough, but the staff does not realize the prevalence of this problem. A quality assessment could turn up this problem and create the atmosphere for solving the problem creatively and effectively.
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