Sensitive Outcome Indicators to Increase Quality and Safety in Patient Care in Nursing
Florence Nightingale is the founder of quality nursing practice determined in improving hospital conditions and measuring patient outcomes. In the recent past, the issue that had been the issue in healthcare was the
relationship of nurse staffing and quality of healthcare provide. It was evident that understaffing was directly linked to high rates of mortality (Jansson et al., 2010). As a consequence, the issue was understaffing was
looked into and then attention shifted to measuring other indicators that are concerned with quality of healthcare. In this scenario, Mr. J, a 72 year old is diagnosed with dementia and recently fell and got injured while
in his house. Therefore, this is an analysis of nursing sensitive indicators that nurses can us to helps him; the use of hospital data on specific nursing-sensitive indicators to improve quality healthcare provided to the patient; and resources and personnel they need to consult to resolve Mr. J's situation.
There are three nursing sensitive indicators namely structure, process, and outcomes. Structural indicators including staffing of nurses, skill level of the nurses and the education certification of the nursing levels of the staffs. Structural indicators are therefore essential in helping Mr. J as far as treatment is concerned. This means that he will be attended to by qualified nurses in dementia and physiotherapy. On the other hand, process indicators measure the methods of nursing interventions and patient assessment. Nursing job satisfaction is too a process indicator. Therefore, the nurses need to take control of the situation Mr. J is in to ensure that he fully recovers (Page, 2014). Lastly, outcome indicators is concerned with reflecting on the patient outcomes which majorly depend on nursing sensitive which are concerned with the quality of quality and quantity of the nursing care provided to Mr. J. the sensitive nursing indicators will help in identifying the health issues that Mr. J has and
provide him with proper nursing care to see him recover fully.
The use of tracked data on specific nursing indicators like prevalence of restraints and pressure ulcers as well as patient satisfaction is helpful in several ways (Patrician et al,. 2010). For instance, when nurses are aware of the recording of certain specific indicators, it can automatically model a certain behavior and shape it towards a particular direction. Likewise, when the staff can track data concerning particular indicator, they can have concrete knowledge of what happened and enable them rectify service delivery for better outcome and
patient service delivery. One the data is retrieved, it will be easier to put into place rectifying measures that will see service delivery in a specific nursing indicator improved (Page, 2014). Therefore, in this case, when data concerned with dementia and body injury are retrieved, Mr. J will receive improved health services than those who were admitted before him.
The …
