Improving Medication Education Scores, Capstone Project Example

Purpose

The main purpose of this project is to ensure we assess and improve our current methods of communication between the patients and the nurses to ensure that effectiveness is achieved through the interventions suggested in this project. Improving the methods of communication will mean that the patients get their problems accurately identified by the healthcare workers, and they can properly communicate on the particular interventions that they will use to help solve the problems of the patient. Through this project, the communication skills, leadership communication skills and printing of the question-answer forms for the patients will be enhanced to the expected level where maximum efficiency is achieved. Also, from this project’s recommendations, both the nurse-to-nurse conversations during shift handovers will be improved so that any nurse taking care of the patient will accurately understand what care the patient needs. There will be no misinterpretation of the information of the patient at any particular point.

The guiding practice-focused questions for this project include; what will be the best communication strategy that will be employed between SBAR and Tech back that the health care society can employ to increase efficiency in communication between nurses and themselves and nurses and patients? What communication objectives are expected to be met by the communication strategy? How will the nurses assess the current communication strategy that they are using and compare it with the suggested communication strategy, and how will the improvisations impact the HCAPHS scores at the end of the year?

This doctoral project can achieve the improving the communication strategy used between the nurses and the patients through the following perspectives; Through the SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation) strategy, the communication skills of the nurses will be the target so that they will be able to communicate effectively with the patients to make sure they ask questions correctly so that they make the patients can accurately give their problems (Thomas, Bertram & Johnson, 2009). Furthermore, we will assess the current method of communication applied in healthcare and the SBAR communication strategy to improve the efficiency and accuracy of information transferred.

Nature of the Doctoral Project

The HCAPHS research survey will be conducted throughout the hospital whereby the patients will be interviewed on the merits they see about the communication strategy used by the health care officials. The patients will be asked to identify the areas that they feel the doctors have not adequately covered. The patients will also be asked about their perspectives on their stay within the hospital and how they feel the nurses have treated them throughout the stay. The patients will then give information on whether they are satisfied with their treatment and feel that the nurse’s visit and conversation covered everything.

Furthermore, various scores will be allocated from the responses of the patients in such a way that they will say were the nurses clear on the medicine communication they had with the patient, did the patient understand the purpose of each medicine recommended, and if they understood the number of times, they are supposed to take medicine and at what intervals (Giordano, Elliott, Goldstein, Lehrman & Spencer, 2010). The information on the responsiveness of the hospital staff will be collected. This information will contain the patients’ experience with the doctors and the nurses in the hospital. They will say if the staff was rude or polite while handling them, they would also give information of how the staff handled the other questions that the patients asked, for example, if the patient asks when they will be discharged, were the answers of the staff satisfying or unsatisfying to the patients.

Lastly, the respondents will be asked to give the information they have on the hospital environment; in this sector, they will be asked if they were given educational materials that educate them about various diseases and how to improve their healthy living. On the environment information, they will also feed the research survey with information regarding the cleanliness and the quietness of the hospital’s environment. All this information will be evidence of the efficiency of the communication strategy that has been used to improve the communication between nurses and themselves and the patients.

Before collecting the evidence from the patients, we made sure that we have obtained authorization from the Walden University Institutional Review Board since we involved human subjects in gathering the information. The evidence collected will be analyzed and arranged through a number of ways; Information will be fed through electronic health records and data organized through computer programs such as Excel and PowerPoint slides that will be presented in the health committee to determine if we have achieved the desired expectations that we had set before (Long, 2012). The information will be organized chronologically to separate data according to the length of stay in the hospital and the time the information is recorded. Those patients that have stayed in the hospital over longer periods will most likely have more information regarding their experience with the communication strategy employed in the healthcare facility as compared to those patients that have been in the hospital for a shorter period.

Finally, the project will be organized to ensure that we have improved the methods of communication in healthcare by initiating the SBAR communication strategy and include in it other techniques that the hospital was initially used to improve the efficiency in communication within the healthcare facility.

Reference

Giordano, L. A., Elliott, M. N., Goldstein, E., Lehrman, W. G., & Spencer, P. A. (2010). Development, implementation, and public reporting of the HCAHPS survey. Medical Care Research and Review, 67(1), 27-37.

Long, L. (2012). Impressing patients while improving HCAHPS. Nursing Management, 43(12), 32-37.

Thomas, C. M., Bertram, E., & Johnson, D. (2009). The SBAR communication technique: teaching nursing students professional communication skills. Nurse educator, 34(4), 176-180.