Developing an Evaluation Plan: Hourly Nurse Rounds

Developing An Evaluation Plan: Hourly Nurse rounds
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Background
Implementing hourly rounding has been chosen to reduce patient falls, reduce the call light/ bell use and improve quality of care, where nurse presence and assessing the patients comfort needs is necessary to improve patient outcomes (Baldwin, 2012).Additionally, the project is expected to improve patient safety and satisfaction with the care delivery. For the non-ambulatory (bedridden) chronic care patients, mobility is a problem and implementing intentional hourly rounding based on evidence will ensure successful practice change. Careful planning and communication of the hourly rounding program facilitate evaluation of the viability of the project. Correlation between hourly rounding and patient fall rates will indicate the effectiveness of the practice change with this information presented to the senior management. The expectation is that the change is appropriate and will be adopted focusing on quality outcome data.
Methods to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed solution
Surveying staff to understand their attitudes is relevant to understanding whether they are satisfied with the project implementation. When the nurses feel that they own the process and it is not imposed to them by the top leadership they are more receive to change as they are satisfied with the proposed plans. Hence, the surveys are to be conducted before and after implementation of hourly rounding, making it possible to evaluate the proposal.
Another method is to compare patient discharge surveys before change and after initiation of change. These surveys are conducted to determine whether patients are satisfied with hourly rounding, and whether team members especially nurses visited them regularly. Results of the surveys differ depending on the settings, questions and ability of team members to effect changes. Emerson, Chmura, & Walker (2014), gathered data and information from vendor-collected patient satisfaction surveys and family discharge opinion surveys indicated that patient satisfaction with hourly rounding was minimal.Variables
Nurse attitudes towards implementing the project affect the viability of the proposed changes. Nurse responsiveness to patient initiated call light usage is one of the ways to understand how they improve patient-safety practice (Tzeng, 2010). The chronically ill patients may find it difficult to utilize call system. Difficulties among the nursing staff to understand the patient care priorities make it difficult to implement the individualized plans. For the proposed change to be implemented successfully, nurses need to understand and support the initiative. This is possible when they have positive attitudes of the proposal, as there are less likely to resist changes. The nurse perspective of hourly rounding also depends on the staffing requirements, the working environment and structure measures. Hence, it is necessary to understand how these factors influence the decisions in clinical settings, and how proposal affected patient safety.
Effective care management improves patient outcomes and is likely to improve patient satisfaction with the interventions. The patients' beliefs a...