Within the Discussion Board area, write 250 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. You are required to use 1 scholarly resource in addition to your textbook. Be substantive and clear and use examples to reinforce your ideas.
Much of nursing education has transformed its teaching to focus on the competencies designed to improve quality and safety across the health care system. These competencies are related to the following:
Patient-centered care
Teamwork and collaboration
Evidence-based practice
Quality improvement
Safety
Informatics
Discuss how critical thinking abilities advance each of these competencies in your clinical practice.
* I am an Operating Room Nurse
* Please use the uploaded APA 7 Template
* Please Cite my book I have uploaded in messages
Unit 4 DB: Nursing Theory
Institutional Affiliations
Unit 4 DB: Nursing Theory
Graduate nurses are expected to possess competencies that they can apply to provide quality and safe care to patients. Nursing institutions design curricula that will instill the desired knowledge, skills, and attitudes in their students to prepare them adequately for their future roles (Baernholdt et al., 2022; Benner et al., 2009). The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) defines specific quality and safety competencies that nurses are expected to possess before they are licensed to practice. The competencies include patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics. Guided by these competencies, nursing education institutions have transformed teaching to demonstrate their commitment to improving patient safety and healthcare quality across the healthcare system (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2022). This assignment will discuss how critical thinking abilities advance each of the QSEN competencies in operating room nursing practice.
Patient-centered Care
Graduate nurses should demonstrate their patient-centered care competencies by showing their abilities to recognize the patient as the source of control of his or her health. Additionally, nurses should be able to provide care that respects a patient’s values, beliefs, and preferences. Critical thinking abilities help to advance patient-centered care competency by enabling operating room nurses to examine how actively involving patients and families in care delivery can help to improve safety and healthcare quality (Rubenfeld, 2014).
Teamwork and Collaboration
Nurses require teamwork and collaboration competencies to work effectively with both inter and intraprofessional teams to ensure that patients receive quality and safe care. Critical thinking abilities help to advance teamwork and collaboration competencies by guiding operating room nurses to identify the specific roles and define scopes of practice of multidisciplinary teams (Rubenfeld, 2014). This facilitates the provision of integrated quality care that improves patient safety.
Evidence-based Practice
By the time they are graduating from nursing institutions, graduate nurses are expected to be able to combine evidence obtained from research with their clinical expertise and patient preferences to provide quality and safe care to patients. Critical thinking abilities advance evidence-based practice by enabling operating room nurses to establish the quality, relevance, and strengths of evidence available for use in informing decision-making when they are selecting interventions to address patients’ problems (Rubenfeld, 2014). Besides, critical thinking enables operating room nurses to engage in clinical inquiry in order to locate the best evidence to inform practice.
Quality Improvement
For nurses to effectively engage in quality improvement within their settings, they should have the capacity to utilize data to propose changes that promote a continuous advancement of positive patient outcomes. Operating room nurses utilize their critical thinking abilities to advance quality improvement by identifying how factors within their settings affect patient outcomes (Rubenfeld, 2014). This helps them to devise strategies to continuously improve factors that are causing negative impacts on patients’ outcomes.
Safety and Informatics
Graduate nurses apply safety competencies and informatics competencies to minimize harm to patients and utilize health information technology to enhance communication respectively. Critical thinking abilities enable operating room nurses to advance safety and informatics competencies by guiding them to eliminate hazards and ensure privacy when sharing information using health information technology tools respectively (Rubenfeld, 2014). The elimination of hazards and protection of patient privacy promote patient safety and improve healthcare quality in the operating room.
Conclusion
As nursing institutions strive to advance the skills of nurses, they need to lay a strong foundation regarding the competencies that the nursing students need to possess to be able to provide quality and safe care. The QSEN competencies offer proper guidance for nursing institutions to design curricula that will instill quality and safety competencies among learners. In order to advance these competencies, academic institutions should teach nurses critical thinking skills that they require to apply their knowledge to clinical practice.