Prepare an 4-5 page paper on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators.

As you begin to prepare this assessment you are encouraged to complete the Conabedian Quality Assessment Framework activity. Quality healthcare delivery requires systematic action. Completion of this will help you succeed with the assessment as you consider how the triad of structure (such as the hospital, clinic, provider qualifications/organizational characteristics) and process (such as the delivery/coordination/education/protocols/practice style or standard of care) may be modified to achieve quality outcomes.

The American Nursing Association (ANA) established the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®) in 1998 to track and report on quality indicators heavily influenced by nursing action.

NDNQI® was established as a standardized approach to evaluating nursing performance in relation to patient outcomes. It provides a database and quality measurement program to track clinical performance and to compare nursing quality measures against other hospital data at the national, regional, and state levels. Nursing-sensitive quality indicators help establish evidence-based practice guidelines in the inpatient and outpatient settings to enhance quality care outcomes and initiate quality improvement educational programs, outreach, and protocol development.

The quality indicators the NDNQI® monitors are organized into three categories: structure, process, and outcome. Theorist Avedis Donabedian first identified these categories. Donabedian’s theory of quality health care focused on the links between quality outcomes and the structures and processes of care (Grove, Gray, Jay, Jay, & Burns, 2015).

Nurses must be knowledgeable about the indicators their workplaces monitor. Some nurses deliver direct patient care that leads to a monitored outcome. Other nurses may be involved in data collection and analysis. In addition, monitoring organizations, including managed care entities, exist to gather data from individual organizations to analyze overall industry quality. All of these roles are important to advance quality and safety outcomes.

The focus of Assessment 4 is on how informatics support monitoring of nursing-sensitive quality indicator data. You will develop an 8–10 minute audio (or video) training module to orient new nurses in a workplace to a single nursing-sensitive quality indicator critical to the organization. Your recording will address how data are collected and disseminated across the organization along with the nurses’ role in supporting accurate reporting and high quality results.

Reference

Grove, S. K., Gray, J. R., Jay, G.W., Jay, H. M., & Burns, N. (2015). Understanding nursing research: Building an evidence-based practice (6th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

Demonstration of Proficiency

By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the course competencies through the following assessment scoring guide criteria:

• Competency 1: Describe nurses’ and the interdisciplinary team’s role in informatics with a focus on electronic health information and patient care technology to support decision making. 
  • Describe the interdisciplinary team’s role in collecting and reporting quality indicator data to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports.
• Competency 3: Evaluate the impact of patient care technologies on desired outcomes. 
  • Explain how a health care organization uses nursing-sensitive quality indicators to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports.
• Competency 4: Recommend the use of a technology to enhance quality and safety standards for patients. 
  • Justify how a nursing-sensitive quality indicator establishes evidence-based practice guidelines for nurses to follow when using patient care technologies to enhance patient safety, satisfaction, and outcomes.
• Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly communication to facilitate use of health information and patient care technologies. 
  • Deliver a professional and effective audio tutorial on a selected quality indicator that engages new nurses and motivates them to accurately report quality data in a timely fashion.
  • Follow APA style and formatting guidelines for citations and references.

Preparation

This assessment requires you to prepare a 4-5 page paper on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators. To successfully prepare for your assessment, you will need to complete the following preparatory activities:

• Select a single nursing-sensitive quality indicator that you see as important to a selected type of health care system.
• Conduct independent research on the most current information about the selected nursing-sensitive quality indicator.
• Interview a professional colleague or contact who is familiar with quality monitoring and how technology can help to collect and report quality indicator data. You do not need to submit the transcript of your conversation, but do integrate what you learned from the interview into the audio tutorial. Consider these questions for your interview: 
  • What is your experience with collecting data and entering it into a database?
  • What challenges have you experienced?
  • How does your organization share with the nursing staff and other members of the health care system the quality improvement monitoring results?
  • What role do bedside nurses and other frontline staff have in entering the data? For example, do staff members enter the information into an electronic medical record for extraction? Or do they enter it into another system? How effective is this process

Instructions

For this assessment, imagine you are a member of a Quality Improvement Council at any type of health care system, whether acute, ambulatory, home health, managed care, et cetera. Your Council has identified that newly hired nurses would benefit from comprehensive training on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators. The Council would like the training to address how this information is collected and disseminated across the organization. It would also like the training to describe the role nurses have in accurate reporting and high-quality results.

The Council indicates a recording is preferable to a written fact sheet due to the popularity of audio blogs. In this way, new hires can listen to the tutorial on their own time using their phone or other device.

As a result of this need, you offer to create an audio tutorial orienting new hires to these topics. You know that you will need a script to guide your audio recording. You also plan to incorporate into your script the insights you learned from conducting an interview with an authority on quality monitoring and the use of technology to collect and report quality indicator data.

You determine that you will cover the following topics in your audio tutorial script:

Introduction: Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicator

• What is the NDNQI®?
• What are nursing-sensitive quality indicators?
• Which particular quality indicator did you select to address in your tutorial?
• Why is this quality indicator important to monitor? 
  • Be sure to address the impact of this indicator on quality of care and patient safety.
• Why do new nurses need to be familiar with this particular quality indicator when providing patient care?

Collection and Distribution of Quality Indicator Data

• According to your interview and other resources, how does your organization collect data on this quality indicator?
• How does the organization disseminate aggregate data?
• What role do nurses play in supporting accurate reporting and high-quality results? 
  • As an example, consider the importance of accurately entering data regarding nursing interventions.

Additional Requirements

• References: Cite a minimum of three scholarly and/or authoritative sources.
• APA: Submit along with the recording a separate Reference page that follows APA style and formatting guidelines. For an APA refresher, consult the APA Style and Formatpage on Campus.