Question

 

Review the story at the link below before posting to the discussion:

Rau, J. (2015). Half of nation’s hospitals fail again to escape Medicare’s readmission penalties. Kaiser Health News. Retrieved from http://khn.org/news/half-of-nations-hospitals-fail-again-to-escape-medicares-readmission-penalties/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

After you have finished, consider how you would respond to the following situation:

Your local hospital has received notice from CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) regarding their readmission rates.

As a BSN prepared nurse, you have been asked to serve as a consultant to suggest a new Quality (Performance) Improvement process for ONE of the areas of deficiency. Write some brief steps (suggestions) for improvement as you contemplate accepting the consulting opportunity.

Share practice improvements utilized from your own clinical nursing experiences that have led to enhanced patient outcomes.

Answer 1

Quality improvement(QI) is an approach to improve and analyse practice performance.It is based on certain concepts.Some suggestions for improvement based on Quality Improvements are

• Conduct regular meetings and establish dedicated QI teams.
• Prioritize the area which needs to be improvised such as examining the patient population for identifying factors hindering care ,long patient wait times ,lack of communication,medication errors
• The data which is collected is analyzed to determine area which needs to be improved,setting goals,and frequent monitoring of the changes after the QI has been established.
• The QI programs successfulness and failure depends on the group work.So any plans made should be transparent to all health care providers and patients so that everyone could contribute to its plan.
• QI is not static,its evoving when quality demands for it.QI should be revised at regular intervals for improving quality assurance and continually collecting feedbacks to bring in change to the defecient area
• The suceess obtained by upgrading QI should be spread to the health care sector so everyone could take up some useful lessons.

2. Being a nurse requires lot of resilence and hardwork to cope up with the daily stress.Quality care is one we cannot compensate with anything.I was working as a post operative nurse for a few years and during term of service i had to deal with so many issues.The main problem is that in our hospital though we do have a quality control check.I often feel it quite inadept for the department.Most of the complaints recieved were almost similar and no effective action was taken.The main reason is that we didnt had a QI team which could collect feed backs,analyze and further investigate the problem based on priority.The stress of the negative feedbacks and the lack of action from the part of the authority made me and some of my colleagues who supported with me, to talk with the Sister incharge..After consulting with the HOD 's finally a QI program was initiated and each member were assigned with specific responsibilities .Since then it became a regular process.it was a huge success.In the beginning there were some problems with prioritizing.The patient outcomes wer positive as months pass by and the whole teamwere appreciated for the efforts.Our department was announed as one of the best among others.Later the QI protocols were experimented to other departments.