Nursing Practitioners: Mastering Nursing-Sensitive Indicators - Essay Sample

Introduction

As a nursing practitioner, you play a vital role in improving the level of care offered to patients. This tutorial is designed to orient new nurses working in a hospital setting on the importance of adhering to the nursing-sensitive indicators. The term "nursing-sensitive indicators" is not new in the medical industry; it was coined in 1996 by a team of researchers to help define elements of patient care that are directly affected as a result of nursing practice (Rahn, 2016).

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The nursing-sensitive indicators reflect on three aspects of nursing care that you need to be familiar with, including, structural indicators, process indicators, and outcome indicators. To access information on the above three aspects of nursing care, you are encouraged to use the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDQI) as it is the only national nursing database that offers quarterly and annual reporting on structure, process and outcome indicators. The goal of NDNQI is to evaluate nursing care at the unit level (Garrard, Boyle, Simon, Dunton, & Gajewski, 2016).

While there exist various nursing-sensitive indicators that you must be well familiarized with, this tutorial will focus on only one indicator - Patient satisfaction with pain management. According to Cantlupe, pain represents a growing patient concern and flourishing service line for healthcare (Cantlupe, 2020). This is an essential indicator to monitor since it represents the most common reason patients visit hospitals. Studies suggest that pain impacts more Americans than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined (Cantlupe, 2020). As a result of the booming pain market, our healthcare center has established pain management centers that focus on chronic and acute pain, which rely on interventional and multidisciplinary procedures. While the attending physician is responsible for prescribing and managing patient pain, it is your role as a nurse to closely monitor your patients and ensure that the levels of pain management are acceptable and maintained.

As a nurse, when you see a patient in pain, your first task is to try to alleviate the pain as soon as possible to make the patient more comfortable in the healthcare setting (Aller, 2020). Therefore, your first instinct will be to recognize the pain and apply the recommended techniques to ease the pain. For instance, if the pain is severe, you can administer strong narcotic pain medications. However, strong narcotics should not be used regularly; it is recommended to consider other alternatives for managing a patient's pain. Since you are likely to work on many patients on the course of your workday, it is imperative to document all the observations that you make. The observation that you should document include; the patient's current pain levels, how the patient has increased or decreased, the focal point of the patient's pain, how the patient responds to medication, the specific pain management alternatives that you have employed and finally how the patient is describing their pain. By documenting this information, following the pain management program, and accurately reporting patient progress to the attending provider, you can ensure that the level of patient care is improved.

Collection and Distribution of Quality Indicator Data

The hospital will be collecting a patient's experiences by using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey (HCAHPS). This data collecting methodology will allow the hospital to analyze whether patients are recording positive outcomes or not. The HCAHPS will be administered to a random sample of patients continuously throughout the year. The data collected will be cleaned, adjusted, and analyzed by the interdisciplinary team to understand the patient's experiences in the hospital. The aggregate data will then be made publicly available for every staff member. The medical staff can access the aggregate data on the hospital's website and understand the facility's level of care.

Nonetheless, the validity of the research findings will depend on the accuracy of the data collected. Since nurses are the first-line caregivers, they play an important role in ensuring that patients are providing accurate data. The nurses should ensure that patients understand the survey questions and that they provide their honest opinion. The interdisciplinary team will ensure that HCAHPS is administered to random patients thought the year.

The nurses will make use of information technology systems to collect patient data. To constantly monitor patients, the nurses will use portable monitors. This is a new technology that allows nurses to check up on patients at all times, even when they are busy (Sarac & Afsar, 2019). These devices will help nurses get real-time alarms and thus responds to nursing needs with immediate effect, for instance, when patients fall off the bed. Patient falls are common in hospitals, and they can cause more pain to patients, more so when nurses are not around (Khalifa, 2019). The portable monitor devices will, therefore, help in monitoring patients constantly and avoid patient falls going unnoticed for a long time, as this will affect the level of care and reduce patient satisfaction. The interdisciplinary team will be responsible for training nurses on how to use portable monitors to achieve improved levels of care.

Conclusion

The data collected from patients will help the hospital in improving the quality of care. The patient's experiences will indicate whether patients are being cared for as needed, or there are shortcomings in the quality of care offered. Nurses must, therefore, ensure that the data collected is accurate and can be depended upon to make informed decisions regarding the quality of patient care. One way of achieving the quality of care is by managing the patient's pain effectively as this helps improve patient satisfaction and also will help the hospital generate more revenue.

References

Aller, T. (2020). What is a Nurse's Role in Pain Management? | NurseChoice. Nursechoice.com. https://www.nursechoice.com/traveler-resources/what-is-a-nurses-role-in-patient-pain-management/.

Cantlupe, J. (2020). Managing Patients' Pain Improves Satisfaction, Revenue | HealthLeaders Media. Healthleadersmedia.com. https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/clinical-care/managing-patients-pain-improves-satisfaction-revenue.

Garrard, L., Boyle, D. K., Simon, M., Dunton, N., & Gajewski, B. (2016). Reliability and validity of the NDNQI injury falls measure. Western journal of nursing research, 38(1), 111-128.

Rahn, D. J. (2016). Transformational teamwork: Exploring the impact of nursing teamwork on nurse-sensitive quality indicators. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 31(3), 262-268.

Sarac, S., & Afsar, G. C. (2019). Is it Possible to Use Portable Monitors which are Cheaper and Simpler Method in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis?. EC Pulmonology and Respiratory Medicine, 8, 356-361.