Medical Surgery Unit Quality Improvement Initiative

Medical Surgery Unit Quality Improvement Initiative
The Quality Improvement Initiative I work at a Medical Surgery Unit where we provide care to hospitalized patients in the facility for testing, observation, or severe illnesses such as a stroke. The unit also prepares patients for surgery in addition to caring for them for a recommended time after their surgical procedures. This unit’s proposed quality improvement initiative is to reduce the falls that hamper patients’ quality health outcomes. These measures include creating an hourly rounding system emphasizing toileting needs and safety checks. Another is assessing chair and bed alarms based on the Schmidt score and random reviews on staff awareness, nursing communication methods, and staff well-being (Chetty, 2018). The strategy also includes enhancing the training of nurses on this aspect of healthcare, improving risk assessments, increasing the use of ambulatory aids, and educating patients and their families on avoiding falls (Khalifa, 2019). Finally, patient placing will be a critical factor in this improvement initiative. The Purpose of the Quality Improvement Initiative This improvement initiative aims to improve the quality of services our Medical Surgery Unit provides in the following ways. It will increase patient satisfaction under the facility’s care because falls lead to injuries, prolonged hospitalization, and legal suits. Consequently, the overall experience of patients at the facility would be negative. Therefore, reducing falls would diminish this negativity, improving overall patient experiences.
It will reduce the unnecessary use of resources within the facility and raise the efficiency levels. For example, falls lead to injuries and prolonged hospitalizations, meaning that nurses must spend additional time caring for the same patient. The patient will also take up bed space at the unit and other resources that another person could have used.
It will improve safety in the medical surgery unit. Security refers to preventing harm, which requires healthcare facilities to do as much as possible to prevent patients from suffering unnecessarily. Achieving this objective remains impossible if these facilities do not improve plans on reducing falls, which occur at high frequency in medical centers. The Target Audience
There are two target audiences for this improvement initiative – patients and nurses. Patients are a special population since they face a higher risk of falling, unlike the administrators, physicians, doctors, nurses, cleaners, caterers, and visitors. The primary reason is that patients may experience disorienting effects of being in a new environment, and others who are under medication such as benzodiazepines may be physically weak (Rensburg, 2020). As a result, their risk for falls is exponentially higher than other people who might be at the medical surgery unit. Therefore, this proposal is primarily for their benefit because it aims to secure their safety and improve their level of satisfaction.
Nurses are a target group because of their level of contact with patients. For example, physicians spend 14.73% of their day shift time in patient rooms compared with 32.97% for nurses (Butler, 2018). Overall, nurses r...