An Analysis Based on the Philosophy of Science, Essay Example

Lately, my practice setting has engaged in several quality improvement initiatives. Of primary focus is the need to prevent medication errors, as these mistakes are easily avoidable if best practices are implemented and improved upon. The main goal of this initiative is to reduce medication errors by at least 25% within a year’s time by improving verbal and written communication through use of electronic health record systems (Patterson-Silver et al., 2012). Furthermore, patient interviews will be conducted more thoroughly so that health care professional are able to gain an adequate understanding of the patient’s health and medication history before they are provided with treatment. Efforts will be put in place to ensure that patients are receiving both the correct type of medication in addition to the correct dosage for their height and weight.

To achieve this goal in one year, the hospital is currently conducting a literature review to determine how other institutions have achieved this quality improvement goal. The review is expected to take several weeks long and be followed by a period of hospital data analysis to relate the health care organization’s data to the data that was uncovered by the articles (Hjørland, 2011). Based on the literature review and institution information, interventions and expectations will be developed. After this initial planning month, the hospital will continue to track the efficacy of the interventions that had been put in place, comparing base line medication error data to the new results in order to determine if the goal if this initiative has been achieved.

While the hospital demonstrated concern with use of evidence-based practice, no evidence-based practice model was used to develop this plan. However, since this quality improvement initiative is still in its early stages, it would be useful to incorporate the Stetler model to guide the remaining components of the project (NCCMT, n.d.). This model is ideal because it can be used to help researchers determine whether implementing new institutional policies can be advantageous. Since the goal of this project is to support the way that the hospital operates in terms of medication dosage and provision of the correct prescription, it will be necessary to implement institutional policies to enact these changes. Furthermore, if this research is successful, it will promote policy implementation on a larger scale, so this evidence-based practice model will continue to be relevant (Spring et al., 2010). Ultimately, the use of this model would have help the hospital create a link between hospital data and how it could be applied in a manner that will drive policy change.

To sustain the practices that the implementation of the Stetler model would provide, it is necessary for the hospital to continue to review the quality improvement change to determine if the program is successful. While the hospital’s current goal is to determine how to improve quality over a one year period, it would be practical to continue this mission into the future. As a consequence, the Stetler model should be continuously implemented to determine how medication errors can be reduced at a variety of levels. In addition, it can be used to determine how to implement policy that will help reduce the medication error rate even more significantly than the goal for the first year of this project. In the future, this program would benefit from the creation of employee training programs so that employees are better prepared to enforce these goals.

References

Hjørland B. (2011). Evidence based practice: An analysis based on the philosophy of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(7): 1301–10.

NCCMT. (n.d.). Stetler model of evidence-based practice. Retrieved from http://www.nccmt.ca/registry/view/eng/83.html

Patterson-Silver W, Dulmus CN, Maguin E. (2012). Empirically supported treatment’s impact on organizational culture and climate.Research on Social Work Practice, 22(6): 665–671.

Spring B, Hitchcock K. (2010). Evidence-based practice in psychology. Wiley.