Quality and Safety Education for Nurses, Essay Example

Broadly, it is important for all nurses to follow the standards provided by the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN). It is expected that these competencies will help build patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics (QSEN, n.d.). A useful tool proposed by the QSEN is the AHRQ Quality Indicator Toolkit, which allows healthcare organizations to assess its current dedication to quality assurance in addition to indicating areas that workers would be able to help improve.

An understanding of quality is essential at all organizations, whether quality standards are followed at a local, state, or national level. In particular, there are many best practices that health care professionals can follow in order to actively provide patients with the best possible care. Such competencies can be readily implemented into the workplace or professional nursing setting by providing employees with adequate professional development and training programs that will allow them to better understand these ethical requirements in addition to how they can be implemented within the context of a particular health care setting.

In order for supervisors to understand how to adequately tackle quality issues within the health care organization, it is plausible for them to implement the “practice improvement” process, which helps the institution identify pressing quality issues, first tackling the matters that could be improved in the quickest amount of time while producing the most meaningful result. To do so, a problem needs first be identified using observations in addition to recorded hospital data. Once a problem is established, it should be written in terms of an objective that can be understood by all participants. Next, an improvement team should be established to determine how the quality improvement study should be conducted. Alternatives to the plan, including different interventions should be considered before a plan is decided on. Last, the plan should be revised as needed.

Ultimately, there are many standards that this method could help health care professionals improve within their respective health care institutions. The most pressing of which is the high prevalence of medication errors that occur. Medication errors have the potential of causing extreme detriment to the patient and are completely avoidable, as they are typically due to human error. Many organizations postulate that the use of electronic health record systems could reduce the number of medication errors that occur within an organization, so it would be reasonable to test this system as an intervention to determine whether it would help improve quality of care. Furthermore, it is expected that these systems can help increase efficiency in the hospital, thereby reducing wait time, which is another quality standard of concern in many organizations.

Overall, many quality problems can be resolved by implementing the “practice improvement” process and it’s important to consider that many institutional problems are unique and that each organization must therefore undergo their own quality improvement initiatives. While techniques and ideas can be drawn from successes that have occurred at other institutions, it is important for health care professionals to confirm or deny whether these same solutions are applicable for an institution that has yet to test this approach. In order for a health care organization to improve, it is important to regularly conduct these quality checks, but overall, they are expected to confer benefit for both the patient and the health care team.

Works Cited

Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN). N.D. Web. 2 June 2015. Retrieved from http://www.qsen.org.