Improving Nursing Quality of Patient Care

NURSE-SENSITIVE INDICATORS OF QUALITY RELATED TO PATIENT CARE

Nurse-Sensitive Indicators of Quality Related to Patient Care

Nurse-sensitive indicators of quality measure elements of patient care that are directly impacted by the nursing practice. The two nurse-sensitive indicators of quality that we focus on are hospital-acquired infections and medication administration errors. Hospital-acquired infections are infections patients get while receiving treatment for surgical or medical conditions. The infections can occur in any setting of care. Hospitalized patients are susceptible to contracting infections if care is not taken correctly. A patient is considered to have acquired an infection in the hospital if they did not have the infection during their admission, and it manifested 48 hours after admission to the hospital. Infections can be viral, fungal, or bacterial pathogens, and the most common is pneumonia, bloodstream infection, urinary tract infection (UTI), and surgical site infection (Monegro et al., 2020). The infections will result in the patient staying longer than initially expected and increasing their medical costs. Medication administration errors refer to any difference between what the patient was supposed to receive and what was prescribed by the physician. Any discrepancy might result in harm to the patient, which is avoidable. Most medication errors occur during the administration phase. Nurses are charged with administering medications to hospitalized patients. The most common medication errors are wrong dose, wrong route, wrong time, omission of doses, wrong drug, wrong patient, and technical errors.

Social Cognitive Theory

The social cognitive theory was used to model desired behavior by nurses. Nurses will observe other experienced nurses performing their duties and model the desired behavior. With positive outcomes from the experienced nurses, other nurses can mimic the experienced nurses resulting in positive and better-quality outcomes for the patients. For the case of hospital-acquired infections, experienced nurses can demonstrate how to prevent infections from occurring in hospitalized patients, and graduate nurses can model the same behaviors. There will be contextual rewards received by those who excel in their performance, motivating other nurses to mimic the same behavior. Receiving positive feedback from hospital administrators regarding the improvements made and the number of infections reduced is a great motivator for other nurses since they can see that the interventions or behaviors are effective. Nurses can observe one another and learn from each other on how they can reduce hospital-acquired infections. Combined with positive reinforcement of the desired performance, nurses can motivate them to improve their performance and reduce infections. With an adequately modeled behavior, nurses can reduce the cases of hospital-acquired infections since they will be encouraged to ensure their patients don't get infected (Chen et al., 2020). Nursing practice is impacted through better outcomes for patients as some of the infections can be fatal. The practice setting is improved as nurses know how to protect their patients from infections, improving patient outcomes (Monegro et al., 2020).

Change Theory

To reduce medication errors, there must be a change in the processes used in the hospital. It was established that nurses might misread handwritten prescriptions in most cases (Schroers et al., 2021). Physicians have varying handwritings, and some might not be legible to all nurses resulting in a patient being administered a wrong dose or wrong medication. Using the change theory, hospitals were encouraged to eliminate handwritten prescriptions and instead have physicians type the prescriptions on the hospital system. Also, health care facilities had to implement a hospital system for use across all the departments to ensure there were no written notes or prescriptions. Nurses being able to read prescriptions properly is vital for reducing medication errors. Cost of care is reduced since incidences of wrong medications are eliminated or lowered. Nurses wish for better patient outcomes, and they get affected when they make honest mistakes. A medication error mistake will negatively affect a nurse's motivation and confidence. Having a system that assists nurses in reducing the chances of medication errors is beneficial to the nursing practice and will improve nursing care (Schroers et al., 2021). Reading prescriptions correctly is no longer a game of chance, and one can know for sure they are administering the right medication to the right patient.