Essay Example on Registered Nurses: Evidence-Based Practices for Quality Care

Nurses use evidence-based practices in making clinical decisions. A good example of this is hand hygiene to prevent the spread of infection. How else does a registered nurse use guide research in the clinical setting?

Registered nurses play an integral part in the administration of care, and therefore, they are at the center of everything that involves the quality of care (Peter et al., 2015). They usually apply evidence-based practices that have been proved to enhance the quality of care for patients. Evidence-based practices are essential in health systems as they improve patient outcomes, lower the cost of care, and impart RN with superior nursing skills. In addition to evidence-based practices being helpful to RN in making clinical decisions, they also help in improving the safety of patients. Patient safety is a priority for every healthcare organization (Peter et al., 2015). Before evidence-based practices, RN and doctors made many medical errors as a result of the misidentification of patients. Misidentification of patients usually leads to harming patients as well as disrupting the provision of care to patients. Evidence-based practices require RN to apply two-way identifiers to identify patients before they can be provided with care or treated.

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Explore your clinical site and relate one quality improvement (QI) study currently being analyzed. What is benchmarked in the study? What role does the nurse play in the QI study?

After carefully exploring my clinical site I am working at, I found out that patient follow-ups were being done for patients who had been discharged as one way of improving the quality of medical care at the clinic by the quality management department. The follow-ups aim at ensuring that patients follow their medication, adhere to all instructions given, and also to enhance their post-hospitalization care while at home. The objective of this quality improvement plan was to reduce the rate of readmitting patients who fail to recover after being discharged as a result of not complying with medication and following instructions given by doctors. Application of evidence-based practices established by the Joint Commission and the Center for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) to improve the safety of patients and the outcomes of hospital care was also stressed during the quality improvement activity. Quality improvement is key to the amount hospitals receive from both Medicare and Medicaid (Ellis, 2019). Thus, healthcare organizations need to develop unique, quality improvement steps to receive more funds. The benchmark of this improvement plan is to reduce the readmission rate of discharged patients by at least30% in the next 12 months.

During this improvement plan task, nurses played several important roles, such as educating the patients, implementing evidence-based practices, auditing, and verifying if the hospital complied with cores as propagated by CMS.

What stood out to you after exploring the Sigma Theta Tau website?

After exploring the Sigma Theta Tau website, I learned several things about the organization. Sigma Theta Tau is a prestigious health organization over 500 charters located in different countries (Sigma Theta Tau, 2019). The organization invites its members, including nursing leaders who have been exceptional in their performance for both Baccalaureate and graduate scholarships. The organization's mission is to improve global health and celebrate nursing achievements in leadership, provision of services, and provision of scholarships to students in the field of nursing. The organization has been able to achieve its mission by establishing its operations world. It has also improved the delivery of its health services as well as helping its staff to further their studies, which motivates them to deliver better services to clients. Although I learned a lot of things from the website about the Sigma Theta Tau, the organization's reputation worldwide is the most outstanding feature for me. The organization operates in several countries, and it has positive reviews in almost every country it operates.

Do you describe yourself as a lifelong learner? If so, why do you feel it is important?

No one is all-knowing unless he or she is God. We gain knowledge through learning, and therefore, I consider myself a lifelong learner. It is now more than ten years in school, and I have gained a lot of knowledge in different facets of life that would otherwise be impossible if it was not through learning. Therefore, lifelong learning is essential for everyone who wants to stay informed about different updates and information in their field of specialization. Additionally, the study has shown that keeping one brain active through learning stimulates their mind cognitively, which helps to reduce the prevalence of dementia (Mikroyannidis et al., 2018). I intend to further my education and specialize in psychiatric nursing. In our society, cases of increased mental illness have become common. My passion as a nurse is to assist people with trauma and grief to mitigate the negative consequences of mental illness and help them to lead normal lives like before.

References

Ellis, P. (2019). Evidence-based practice in nursing. Learning Matters.

Mikroyannidis, A., Domingue, J., Bachler, M., & Quick, K. (2018). A learner-centered approach for lifelong learning powered by the blockchain. In EdMedia+ Innovate Learning (pp. 1388-1393). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Peter, D., Robinson, P., Jordan, M., Lawrence, S., Casey, K., & Salas-Lopez, D. (2015). Reducing readmissions using teach-back: enhancing patient and family education. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(1), 35-42. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f086/bf701f267610461006caec9b859436ab7d0d.pdf

Sigma Theta Tau. (2019, February). Center for excellent nursing education. https://www.sigmanursing.org/learn-grow/education/center-for-excellence-in-nursing-education