Nursing Plan Essay: Pressure Ulcer Quality Indicator Improvement (Health, Medicine, Nursing Coursework)

Nursing Plan Essay: Pressure Ulcer Quality Indicator Improvement
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Nursing Plan Essay: Pressure Ulcer Quality Indicator Improvement
Introduction
The nursing contribution to healthcare is immense and still holds a lot of untapped potentials. One of the modern concepts in nursing includes Nurse-Sensitive Outcomes or Nursing-Sensitive Indicators. Nursing-Sensitive Indicator is a concept that entails the collection of data that identifies and evaluates nursing outcomes on patient care. Nursing-sensitive indicators are aligned to nursing and differ from medical indicators of care quality. Thus, nursing outcome indicators reflect results that are determined by nursing care. This paper will focus on pressure ulcers as a nursing quality indicator for improvement by reviewing the Nurse-Sensitive Quality Indicator Dashboard from NDNQI (National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators) for the Adams 5 Inpatient Rehab Unit. It will explore four areas; assess areas showing desirable performance, and those that need improvement. Finally, the article will develop a teaching plan being leveraged on evidence-based practice to improve.
Dashboard Analysis
The Nurse-Sensitive Quality Indicators for Adams 5 Inpatient Rehab Unit revolved on assessing four areas, which encompassed NDNQI data, Serviceline or Unit specific Indicators, Nurse Sensitive General Indicators, and Nurse-Sensitive Patient Satisfaction Survey Indicators, which were measured to determine the Nursing-Sensitive Indicators.
The analysis of the NDNQI data of the Adams 5 Inpatient Rehab reveals various items. First, the Nursing Hours per Patient Day (NHPPD) assessment outcomes are not far from the set targets as evidenced by small negative variation of 0.04. Second, the registered nurse care hours of care are within the set limits, and the Bachelors of Science Nursing providers are consistently meeting the set requirements. Third, the Agency Nurse Hours might have failed in the first three quarters but fall onto desired the performance target in the fourth quarter. Fourth, the percentage of patients with pressure ulcers was unable to meet performance targets in three of the four quarters despite the observation that the percentage of patients with acquired patient ulcers performed fairly well by approximately 50 %. It can be noted that there were about 39 % missed evaluations for pressure ulcers within 34 hours thought they had been missed patients of peptic ulcer disease in the previous quarters. Finally, the nurse Serviceline or Unit specific Indicators, Nurse Sensitive General Indicators, and Nurse-Sensitive Patient Satisfaction Survey Indicators are quite satisfactory. Little efforts are needed to improve areas where there is a shortfall in the quality of care.
Pressure ulcers constitute a major health challenge among severe and high-care dependency patients. A pressure ulcer is defined as a localized injury to the skin and underlying tissues over a bony prominence due to pressure with possible combination with shear (Kottner & Balzer, 2010). Hospital-acquired pressure ulcers are often associated with increased morbidity, increasing healthcare costs, and worsening quality of life and its prevention remains a challe...