The Importance Of Quality Improvement

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Maintenance and promotion of quality improvement initiatives are essential for the successful growth and development of the health care industry. Nurses are key to all quality improvement initiatives as they are in the frontlines and have the most contact with the healthcare consumers. Therefore, nursing professionals are good at putting in their valuable inputs for quality improvement efforts. On a daily basis nursing professionals strive to deliver safe, efficient, effective, patient-centered care in a timely manner. With the growth and development in the health care industry, there is an increased need to provide competent and high quality services. Nurses are equipped with distinctive proficiency required for delivery of patient care …show more content…

The first nurse to introduce quality improvement was Florence Nightingale, who through gathering data on the positive effects of keeping adequate hygiene, nutrition and proper ventilation on the mortality rate during the Crimean War (Hood, 2014, p. 490-491). The initiatives towards improvement of quality lead to formation the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which is now known as The Joint Commission (2007). The Joint Commission is non-profit organization which gives accreditation to hospitals for recognizing their efforts to deliver quality health care with an added advantage of being eligible for the Medicare reimbursement program. Moreover, the Joint Commission also rolled out the Hospital Patient Safety Goals (2013) to prevent patient safety errors. Nursing professionals are essential for health care organizations to achieve and maintain the patient-safety goals as their work directly impacts the quality and safety of the patients. For instance, using two patient identifiers during medication administration to avert errors. Nurses have the distinct skills and responsibility towards patient safety and hence the need for Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) is the rational step towards quality improvement. Through the years, the QSEN has developed in Phases to ascertain the areas of competency requirements for nurses to deliver safe, efficient and excellent health care …show more content…

She further identified seven concepts that are essential to current nursing practice, she stated that,” Based on the acronym FLOWERSTM, they include fundamentals of care, leadership at the bedside, ownership of outcomes, wisdom, ethics, relational competence, and skilled caring.” (Sprayberry, 2014, p.123). Nursing professionals play several key roles, which directly affects client outcomes, such as, critically thinking while being the patient-caregiver, advocate and educator along with coordinating and collaborating with the various members of the multidisciplinary health care delivery team. Nurses always prioritize excellent patient safety and care every day and collect information and recognize the practices that need improvement. For example, the process of identification and documentation of nursing-sensitive outcomes that are a direct result of nursing assessments and interventions. Nursing professionals take leadership roles concerning promoting safety and quality through collecting evidence, analyzing and interpreting the data necessary to improve practice. Armed with the edge of working closely with clients, nursing professionals can identify opportunities of cost-effectiveness without compromising on QI. Through being patient advocates, nurses ensure, that health care clients receive good quality and

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