Question

examples of cost improvement projects in a nursing unit

Answer 1

Cost Improvement Projects in Nursing Unit:

payment for health care in US is complex web involving Insurance companies.government agencies, out of poket payaments by consumers more than off - of health care costs are paid by private insurance or indivviduals. the federal govt is the single biggest payer through medicre and Medicaid

How Nurse can help reduce health care cost:

After a unit budget is approved it must be monitor continuously to ensure expense stay within projected the budgetry limits.The Nursing gets feed back on actual Expenses data that shows any discrepancies between budgetry projection and actual results These are called variances.ensuring that each department stays with in the budget for the year expenses are controlled

Nursing is the largest professional group is the hospital and usually most expensive. As a Nurse,you can play an important role in helping reduce costs based on the unit census patient acuity

Throughout nursing school and my career, I have worked at various hospitals to gain experience in providing the best patient care. I have observed acute care facilities and cultures, and from my observations and experiences, I have seen that things are done differently in each of these places. However, what is common among all of these settings is patient supply waste, and this is a problem in some places more than in others. From my microsystem analysis in the orthopedic surgical unit, I see that we are in need of an improvement project for reducing patient supply waste. In patient rooms, there are always extra supplies for personal cleaning, intravenous therapy, respiratory management, and wound care. In isolation rooms, there are even more supplies because each nurse with each shift brings supplies into patient rooms just in case they are needed. When in a hurry, nobody wants to go back into the supply room to get something else that is needed, especially after donning protective clothing and equipment. Coming out of the isolation rooms means that they would have to process back out (take out the gown and gloves, discard them, and wash hands) and back in (wash hands and don the protective Running head: Reducing Patient Supply Waste to Improve Patient Care 3 clothing and equipment) again, ultimately creating even more waste; therefore, nurses anticipate what might be needed in a room and take extra supplies just in case. The supplies are kept in drawers to keep rooms tidy, but when they are invisible and forgotten, the cycle of waste continues. All supplies (even unopened ones) are discarded at patient discharge due to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) requirements and hospital infection prevention precautions (Riebling, 2009). By reducing all of this waste, I hoped to increase patient satisfaction and care.                

Upon analyzing the findings, I sought to address two challenges on this unit: to accomplish my goal of increasing barcode scanning of supplies through staff education, and to recommend the purchasing of needed equipment so that nurses could increase their efficiency. For example, there are only three Dynamaps that are functional in the unit. Nurses have to wait for each other to start their patient rounds; there are 47 nurses on this floor on various shifts (3 shifts/24 hours). On average, it takes about 15 minutes (twice per shift and as needed) to find a Dynamap to start taking vital signs. The total average wasted RN time searching for a machine is calculated to be 264 hours, or $17,100 monthly and $188,100 annually. If we could eliminate the wasted RN time by obtaining more Dynamaps, we would increase nurse efficiency, which could then in turn increase the barcode scanning.