Nursing Roles in Quality Improvement

Demonstrate leadership strategies that promote safety and improve quality in nursing practice and increase collaboration with other disciplines when planning patient-centered care within systems-based practice. (PO2)

How do nurses promote patient safety and improve quality at your workplace (or previous clinical setting)? What changes would you suggest be made on your unit or facility to improve a nonpunitive culture of safety? Nurses and quality care go hand in hand. If you work in an American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet organization, or are on the Journey to Magnet, you probably have dashboards, or quality boards. If you don’t work in that type of environment, you may still have quality reporting through national databases. The National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators TM (NDNQI®) is the only national nursing database that provides quarterly and annual reporting of structure, process, and outcome indicators to evaluate nursing care at the unit level. You are provided with unit level data on Falls, Pressure Ulcers, Hospital Acquired Infections, and Nurse Satisfaction. NDNQI or the Center for Disease Control’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) are two databases for hospital acquired infections. In addition to many quality projects around these topics, safety is also the top of concerns in healthcare organizations. Many hospitals have implemented “safety first” campaigns that are based on safety programs in the nuclear industry. The Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm Series found between 44,000 and 98,000 people die annually as a result of preventable medical errors. (Hood, 2018) and medical errors in the health field are one of the leading causes of unexpected deaths in the United States. (Hood, 2018) What are the factors that are making these health care professionals make these mistakes? Is it knowledge? Process? Systems? Intentional disregard?

Must use an outside scholarly source this book. Hood, L. J. (2018). Leddy & Pepper’s professional nursing (9th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

• Chapter 18: pp. 474–504

Other Readings

• Massachusetts Nurse of the Future Nursing Core Competencies©: pp. 42–46 (Go to the Webliography to find a link to this file.)
• AACN Essentials of Baccalaureate Education: pp. 13–15. (Go to the Webliography to find a link to this file.)