Role of Nurses in Hospital Quality Improvement (Essay Sample)

Role of Nurses in Hospital Quality Improvement
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While hospital’s demand to quality improvement (QI) activities is evident, the role of nurses in these efforts is enormous. My hospital has fast-tracked a number of key strategies to embrace QI. In terms of leadership support, the hospital has crafted a culture compassionate of quality improvement activities and stressing their significance across board. There is an eminent support from top leadership trickling down the ranks thus making nurses and other staff engagement effective. This level of sponsorship has been an incentive to the improvement of quality, not only from nurses but across board from the managers as well.
Other key strategies of partaking by the hospital include one, making the QI efforts a shared responsibility thus setting prospects for the entire team- not just nurses. Secondly is the tact of holding every staff responsible for individual roles. Another strategy is that of inspiration and using nurses and another staff to champion QI efforts. Lastly, is the continual evaluation of feedback to engage staff effectively (Draper, Melicha, Liebhaber & Felland, 2008)
My role in this hospital is to ensure full implementation of the Quality improvement as well as taking care for patients. It is tough to strike equilibrium between the two, but with proper planning and understanding the need for QI, I have embraced both in equal measure. Taking ownership of the challenges has been vital for my success despite few pitfalls.
Among the factors affecting nurses is the scarcity of resources to sustain the operations in the hospitals. Those available cannot support quality improvement as well as nursing coverage for patient care. Consequently, there is a significant shortage of nurses in some areas as more age out of the workforce and the demand continues to surpass the supply. Such inadequacies contribute to diminishing of imperative of QI. Second challenge is the ever-growing need for inclusion of more nurses in QI activities, many of which viewed as duplicative. The lack of standards in measuring quality and exposure intensifies this problem as per many researches (web). In fact, increased demand for such activities often leads to staff frustrations when facing the dilemma of achieving everything at once. (Draper, Melicha, Liebhaber & Felland, 2008)
The third challenge is the high administrative burden associated with QI. This problem is so immense that it precludes nurses from having more substantive role. Lots of time spent on collecting and analyzing data means that no time is set aside for implementing changes. Final impediment is the discord of traditional schooling with current nursing education. The past nursing learning did not put much emphasis on the role of nurses on QI. Such training lacked better preparation in depth for nurses at translating the inspection of problems at bedside into a...