Hourly Rounding
Nurses hate it when patients are constantly turning their call lights on. The nurse feels like they are continuously in and out of that room for every little thing. Patients hate it when they wait a long time for someone to show up after pressing their call light. The patient begins to feel that they are not being take care of well and are being ignored. Patient satisfaction surveys state that one of the top complaints from patients were call lights not being answered in a timely manner. There has been evidence to prove that if facilities implement hourly rounding into their daily routine patient satisfaction goes up and call light use is greatly reduced. It is also proven if patient satisfaction goes up more nurses are satisfied with their job performance and can take care of their patients better.
Hourly rounding involves someone, either a nurse or a support staff, to check on the patient once every hour. During this check “staff engage patients by checking on the 4 P’s: Pain, Positioning, potty, and proximity of personal items.”(Halm, 2014) By doing these checks we can eliminate many of the reasons why call lights are being used for. Which will give a sense of security and reduce anxiety in patients. When patients know that someone will be back in a specific time frame to check on them much of their anxiety about being in the hospital will be relieved. Disturbed sleep is another complaint of many patients in the hospital. Therefore, for hourly rounding to be effective patients will also be told that if they are sleeping we will check on them but not wake them unless it is necessary.
These hourly checks can prevent many adverse events from happening such as falls, pressure sores, and skin breakdown....
... middle of paper ...
...staff allowing more time for the nursing staff to perform nursing duties.
Hourly rounding has been proven to be effective in many hospitals throughout the United States. With many hospitals, trying to improve their patient satisfaction scores implementing an hourly rounding program seems like the right way to go. Patient satisfaction will go up when the patient feels like they are being cared for. Checking on a patient once every hour will make them feel like there is concern for their well-being, which would help them ease their anxiety. In turn hourly rounding will reduce stress for nurses making for happier nurses who are more satisfied with their work and are capable of taking care of patients better. Hourly rounding is a positive situation for both the nursing staff and the patient and should be implemented as part of standard care in every hospital.
In the case of nurse staffing, the more nurses there are the better outcome of patient safety. When there enough staff to handle the number of patients, there is a better quality of care that can be provided. The nurses would be able to focus on the patients, monitor the conditions closely, performs assessments as they should, and administer medications on time. There will be a reduction in errors, patient complications, mortality, nurse fatigue and nurse burnout (Curtan, 2016). While improving patient satisfaction and nurse job satisfaction. This allows the principle of non-maleficence, do no harm, to be carried out correctly. A study mentioned in Scientific America showed that after California passed a law in 2014 to regulate hospital staffing and set a minimum of nurse to patient ratios, there was an improvement in patient care. Including lower rates of post-surgery infection, falls and other micro emergencies in hospitals (Jacobson,
...ifferent from the previous paper process in that it will improve and streamline the Nurse Leader’s rounding process through technology that provides automated escalations to other members of the team (CipherHealth, 2016). Through the technology, data can be tracked and trended to improve processes.
Nursing standards are the building blocks that lead to excellent patient care. The ANA (American Nursing Association) has standardized sixteen common practices for the best quality care of patients by nurses. Nurses are only able to facilitate minimal standards to patients due to time restraints derived from patient ratios and lack of support from administration. The hope to achieve the best possible outcomes in patient care are limited to the minimal standards expected of nurses from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (ANA, 2010). Patient ratios have been seen as a huge issue across the realm of nurses and health care facilities in deliverance on patient care. Addressing the issue of nursing shortages and the effects on ...
Ford, B. M. (2010). Hourly rounding: a strategy to improve patient satisfaction scores. MedSurg Nursing, 19(3), 188-191.
Many nurses face the issue of understaffing and having too much of a workload during one shift. When a unit is understaffed not only do the nurses get burnt out, but the patients also don’t receive the care they deserve. The nurse-patient ratio is an aspect that gets overlooked in many facilities that could lead to possible devastating errors. Nurse- patient ratio issues have been a widely studied topic and recently new changes have been made to improve the problem.
The nurse to patient ratio is unrealistic in many hospitals. In most cases it is almost impossible to give each patient the true amount of detailed care they really need. This is seen in most cases where there is one nurse assigned to 16 patients and each patient requires a different level of attention. Nurses are pressed for time, forcing them to cut corners, resulting in an increase in nosocomial infections and patient deaths. “The past decade has been a unsettled time for many US hospitals and practicing nu...
...anging as new research and methods are discovered to better serve the patients and healthcare professionals (Ignatavicius & Workman, 2013). As nurses use rounding in all their patient care, they will become more skilled with the nursing process, especially with assessments and interventions. Patients are the major users of hospitals and deserve the highest level of care with the best outcomes. With nurse rounding, patient outcomes are improving with a reduction in patient falls and pressure ulcers, use of call light, patient complaints, and most importantly an increase in patient satisfaction (Forde-Johnston, 2014). Nurses play a critical role in the patient care experience; they have the ability to transform healthcare by delivering optimal care thereby improving quality and safety through competent and compassionate use of nurse rounding (Blakley, et al.,2011).
In the past two decades, there has been a push for appropriate staff to client ratios. However, measuring client needs and nursing efforts have been around since 1922 (Lewinski-Corwin, 1922, pp. 603-606). The earliest recorded effort was by the New York Academy of Medicine. Superintendents and nurses from ten training schools documented the time spent providing bedside care. From complied information, the researchers revealed each client required an average of five hours and four minutes of care in a 24-hour period. From these observations, they evaluated staffing issues in New York City. At that time, none of the hospitals were sufficiently staffed (Lewinski-Corwin, 1922, pp. 603-606).
Without participating in a longitudinal study, it is difficult to truly assess the efficacy in mandating nurse staffing ratios. It is difficult to measure the benefits of mandated staffing due to numerous confounding variables. These confounding variables include the resources available at specific hospitals in addition to the populations that they serve. Hospital volume, RN job satisfaction and the relationship between physicians and nurses have also been shown to affect patient outcomes (Duval et al., 2007).
This article has shown me that new strategies are needed to reduce sleep disturbances, improve sleep quality, and support the need for supplemental daytime sleep in hospitalized individuals. These strategies include monitoring patients’ sleep and assess quality of sleep and duration, resolving the problems of sleep disturbance, recognizing that nighttime noise, light, and other factors potentially interfere with patient sleep, minimize lighting in shared patient rooms and turn off lights earlier at night, frequently assess for pain and administer prescribed pain medications to minimize sleep disruption. This article taught me more about sleep cycles and disturbances in hospitalized patients. As a future nurse, I have to accurately assess the patients’ personal characteristics and health education needs, and share this knowledge with my classmates.
Health care organizations are focused on providing high quality and safe patient care. There are numerous organizational factors that may directly affect patient care and outcomes, but one of great importance is nurse staffing. Low nurse staffing levels are a major problem that I have encountered during both my clinical and management experiences. There is a significant relationship between inadequate staffing levels and adverse patient outcomes; however, as I observed during my experiences, there may be increased awareness about this issue, but it has not been sufficiently addressed. In order to ensure patients’ safety and positive outcomes, as well as to improve nurse satisfaction, it is imperative to effectively address low staffing levels.
Patients expect instant response to call lights due to today’s technological advancements. This can negatively impact nurse stress and cause contempt toward the patient. However, the expectation to respond promptly improves safety and encourages frequent rounding. Also, aiming for high patient satisfaction scores on the HCAHPS/Press Ganey by fulfilling patient requests can overshadow safe, efficient, and necessary healthcare. Although patient satisfaction is important, ultimately, the patient’s health takes precedence over satisfying patient and family requests, especially when those requests are unnecessary, harmful, or take away from the plan of care (Junewicz & Youngner, 2015). The HCAHPS/Press Ganey survey focuses on the patient’s perception of care. The problem with this aspect of the survey is that the first and foremost goal of nurses should not be to increase a patient’s score based on perception. According to an article in Health Facilities Management, the nurse’s top priority is to provide the safest, most quality care possible for patients with the resources they are given (Hurst, 2013). Once this has been accomplished, the nurse can then help the patient realize that the most
The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of nursing staffing ratios in the healthcare industry. This has always been a primary issue, and it continues to grow as the population rate increases throughout the years. According to Shakelle (2013), in an early study of 232,432 surgical discharges from several Pennsylvania hospitals, 4,535 patients (2%) died within 30 days of hospitalization. Shakelle (2014) also noted that during the study, there was a difference between 4:1 and 8:1 patient to nurse ratios which translates to approximately 1000 deaths for a group of that size. This issue can be significantly affected in a positive manner by increasing the nurse to patient ratio, which would result in more nurses to spread the work load of the nurses more evenly to provide better coverage and in turn result in better care of patients and a decrease in the mortality rates.
As reported by Bowron (2010), hospitals will benefit from reducing patient-nurse ratio by saving money. Bowron point out that an adequate staffing ratio could lower hospitals’ costs significantly in the following ways:
Notably, having higher proportions of nurses working shorter shifts—8–9 hours or 10–11 hours—resulted in decreases in patient dissatisfaction” (Stimpfel et al.). This is essentially saying that the longer the shift length, the more negative outcomes result. This study proves that eight to nine-hour shifts are more effective, and should, in turn, be worked more than longer shifts. This is a problem because hospitals are likely to continue to schedule nurses for twelve hours shifts out of