Quality Improvement In Healthcare

Buchan and Aiken (2008) stated that the nurses shortage problems may be due to the nurses that not willing to work as a nurse under the current conditions in working environment. A real shortage is circumstances where experienced people are not available for a certain vacancies due to some reasons (Wildschut&Mqolozana, 2008). A news article written by Salma Khalikin in Straits Times stated that according to current situation Singapore may not be able to create enough nurses for upcoming years. The impact of nurses shortage may causes increase work load for nurses which subsequently may increase the risk for nurses made errors in clinical, the risk of increase hospital acquired infections which cause by viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens. More over the impact of shortage of nurses may also increase death rate, and also increase the risk of occupation injuries and exposure in working environments.

Especially, nurses, who are older than 48 years old, may need the drugs for relieved chronic pain as their bodies are easily to be injured to musculoskeletal. There are 10 percent to 15 percent of general population involved in substance abuse. However, healthcare profession has a higher rate of using prescription drugs. The healthcare profession had used drugs for occupational hazard pain (John Furman, January

For example, failure to properly use the information system, or to ignore alerts or warnings have also resulted in preventable errors (Nelson, Evan, & Gardener, 2005). At the time of the event, a bar coding system for all medication had been in effect for a duration of two weeks, however, Thao had been gone one of those crucial weeks. Because of her absence, she did not receive the adequate training, instead, she received a sped

Ethical Issues in Nursing: Nurse-Patient Ratios Megan Harvey, Katie McKelvery, Erica Robbins & Cassandra Tingley St. Johns River State College March 2018 Ethical Issues in Nursing: Nurse-Patient Ratios Every day nurses are faced with ethical dilemmas. Challenges in these situations are becoming more and more complex due to increasing workload and sicker patients. When a nursing unit is understaffed not only are nurses more likely to become burnt out, but their patients are far less likely to receive the quality of care they deserve. The problem is that the Federal regulations require hospitals who participate in Medicare to “have ‘adequate’ numbers of licensed nurses (RN, LPN, CNA) to provide care to all patients as needed,” but the regulations

Likewise in healthcare, oncoming staff generally does initiate not patient care delivery until a hand off process occurs. “Communication failures are increasingly being implicated as important latent factors influencing patient safety in hospitals.”(Sutcliffe, 2004, p. 187) Parker (1996) reports, “the nurses handing over had direct knowledge of the patient and were able to convey idiosyncratic and personal knowledge of the patient. This is a crucial element in professional nursing practice. The nurse can report on clinical judgments and can be held accountable for the judgments made” (Parker, 1996, p. 25) Critical evaluation of nursing actions can be evaluated and considered to be either continued or discontinued based on the rationales for the action and the patient outcome. In 2005, the Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Healthcare published a literature review of clinical handover and patient safety.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is used to facilitate the team analysed to identify the root cause of the above event that resulted in undesired outcome and develop corrective action (Sondalini, 2011). After three months of observation, staff nurse in hemodialysis is too engrossed in writing the nursing report and desolate the bedside patient care. This includes knowledge of the dialysis technician to overcome trouble shooting such as hypotension and cramp which need to be done as soon as possible during dialysis treatment. Other factors have been identified, such as lack of staffing for training staff nurse and newbies dialysis technician. Those factors will not be discussed in this essay.

Abstract/Purpose: (please refer to separate file) The worsening problem of hospital nursing shortage has resulted to inadequate nurse staffing, which affects our nursing care to our patients and our satisfaction towards our job. Understanding how nursing staffing levels affect both patient and nurse outcomes prompted these researchers to conduct a study on hospital nurse staffing levels (Aiken, Clarke, Sloane, Sochalski, & Silber, 2002). The purpose of their study was to examine the relationship between the nurse-to-patient ratio and surgical patient outcomes, specifically patient mortality and mortality following complications nurse retention as well as the factors that influence nurse retention (Aiken et al., 2002). The study was conducted

al, 1999; Gibbs, 1995). Because of this, their failed to assess the pain during patient self-report and give an appropriate treatment. Thus, inadequate pain management will affect the quality of life and also creates a financial burden on health care system such as longer hospitalization and readmission (Grant et. al, 1995; Sheehan et. al, 1996).

1.INTRODUCTION When we talk about abuse or abandon, the first object which comes to our mind definitely will be children. However, the fact is, it happens to the elderly too and the percentage of elderly being abused is getting higher. The elder abuse had become a very common issue in this society. They are either abused by their friends, family members or by the caretakers that are hired by their family, as well as in the nursing home. Nurses in the nursing homes can be biased by giving bad treatments compared to the others.

One ethical obligation nurses are required to fulfil during their shift is to ensure no harm is done to their patient. Due to nursing shortages and too many patient’s, nurses are finding this hard to do. Ethics help nurses make the right decisions with the guidance of their morals, but due to shortages and overworked nurses they tend to feel dissatisfied with their jobs. This results from unsafe work environments, lack of time for communication and quality care of patients. “Understaffing and overtime hours have been associated with increases in patient mortality, hospital-acquired infections, shock, and bloodstream infections” (Kane et al., 2007b).

These alarming statistics raise a huge concern with the effectiveness of the transitions of care. The main issue with transitions of care is that there are discrepancies that mistakenly occur during this process. As reported by Judith Kristeller, PharmD BCPS, “the transition between inpatient and community settings in particular is prone to medication errors related to a lack of communication between health care providers, missed patient follow-up, inadequate patient education, etc.” (6). Medicare services have even included a three percent fine on Medicare payment for hospitals that have unnecessary readmissions, and this percent has increased since 2014 (5). There are so many issues with patient safety that should not be occurring, so reforms must be made in transitions of

At times patients may feel that they are a bother to the nurses and try to get up on their own to use the bathroom and fall, for example. The study conducted by Ford revealed that, due to hourly rounding, the amount of times patient used the call light was reduced by 52% and no