Pressure Ulcer Prevalence as One of the Original Quality Measures for Hospital-based Nursing

Nurse Sensitive Indicators: Pressure Ulcer Prevalence
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Nurse Sensitive Indicators: Pressure Ulcer Prevalence
The American Nursing Association (ANA) founded the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) in 1998 to provide annual and quarterly reports about the effects of nursing policies and practices at the unit level. Nurse Sensitive Indicators are part of the overarching goal of the NDNQI to improve health quality and refer to specific facets of patient care that are directly influenced by nursing practice and impact patient outcomes (Lockhart, 2018). They reflect three elements of nursing care: structure (supply of nursing staff, competency of nursing staff, and certification levels of nursing staff), process (nursing job satisfaction, patient evaluations, and nursing interventions), and outcomes (patient outcomes, quality of nursing care, and hospital readmission rates). This essay will focus on pressure ulcer prevalence as one of the original quality measures for hospital-based nursing.
Pressure ulcer prevalence is a critical quality outcome in today’s health care organization given the growing aging population, nursing shortages, and increasingly disjointed care, all of which have been shown to contribute to the rising cases of pressure ulcers. Preventing pressure ulcers has been a primary nursing concern for many years and is generally viewed as a visible mark of the clinician’s quality of care (Richardson et al., 2016). Many health care professionals believe that pressure ulcer development is not the fault of the disease but rather a failure in nursing care and an indication of a breakdown in cooperation and skills between nurses, physical therapists, physicians, and dieticians. Nurses need to be familiar with this quality indicator when providing patient care because it reflects the quality of care and interdisciplinary collaboration. More importantly, nurses need to pay attention to the quality indicator because pressure ulcers are costly to treat rather than prevent and predict mortality and poor health outcomes.
The first section of this essay will describe the interdisciplinary team’s role in collecting and reporting pressure ulcer prevalence as a quality measure to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports. Preventing pressure ulcers requires that all interdisciplinary members find the need to collect as much data about pressure ulcer prevalence compelling. At the unit level, frontline nurses are the first contact between the patient and the health care organization. They, therefore, serve the critical role of establishing rapport and trusting relationships with patients to gather information on physiologic and developmental statuses. They document and report pressure ulcer rates and the efficacy of existing policies and practices in reducing the same (Lockhart, 2018). Conversely, the role of the nurse informaticist is to integrate computerized, and paper documentation collected by front line nurses, over and above, consolidate multiple data systems such as private data collection systems, health surveys, administrative enrollment a...