Improving Quality of Care and Patient Safety Improvement Plan Tool Kit

Improving Quality of Care and Patient Safety Improvement Plan Tool Kit

This improvement plan tool kit aims to enable nurses to implement and sustain safety improvement measures in health care settings in a geropsychiatric unit. The tool kit has been organized into four categories with three annotated sources each. The categories are as follows: general organizational safety and quality best practices, environmental safety and quality risks, staff-led preventive strategies, and best practices for reporting and improving environmental safety issues.

Annotated Bibliography

General Organizational Safety and Quality Best Practices

Sherwood, G., & Horton-Deutsch, S. (2015). Reflective organizations: On the front lines of QSEN and reflective practice implementation. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral- proquest-com.library.capella.edu/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=3440207#

This e-book presents the paradigm shift required for organizations to provide QSEN (quality and safety education to nurses). It provides readers with the innovative pedagogical approaches required to change traditional content-based health care education methods to interactive methods that engage learners.

These approaches include facilitative teaching, visual thinking strategies, creating a presence that is authentic, and meaningful learning through debriefing. Concrete examples in the resource demonstrate the application of reflective learning. Additionally, the reflective questions in the resource guide readers to evaluate their own practice, either independently or in groups, to implement formal education programs with a focus on self-improvement. The resource prepares nursing students for advanced competency, which will help them adopt reflective thinking, develop a safety culture, and therefore qualitatively improve practices in critical health units such as geropsychiatry units.

Fleiszer, A. R., Semenic, S. E., Ritchie, J. A., Richer, M.-C., & Denis, J.-L. (2016). A unit-level perspective on the long-term sustainability of a nursing best practice guidelines program: An embedded multiple case study. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 53, 204–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2015.09.004

This article helps analyze the sustainability of a best practice guidelines program implemented in acute health care settings. The sustainability of the program was characterized by the following: benefits for patients as the rate of incidence of falls reduced; routinization of best practices as the team’s adherence to guidelines improved; and, in the long term, the development of the team’s adaptability to changes in circumstances that threatened the program.

Seven key factors that accounted for the sustainability of the program were also identified. The source explains how relationships between the characteristics of sustainability (benefits, routinization, and development) and the seven key factors contributed toward the sustainability of the improvement program. This source is valuable for nursing students as it helps them understand how safety programs can be sustained to ensure the long-term reduction of the incidence of sentinel events in geropsychiatric units.

Kossaify, A., Hleihel, W., & Lahoud, J.-C. (2017). Team-based efforts to improve quality of care, the fundamental role of ethics, and the responsibility of health managers: Monitoring and management strategies to enhance teamwork. Public Health, 153, 91–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2017.08.007

IMPROVEMENT PLAN TOOL KIT 4

This paper discusses the benefits of teamwork in improving the quality of health care. It presents a review of 33 papers identified after performing a search on PubMed. The paper discusses the important ingredients of efficient teamwork such as self-awareness and the individual behavior of team members, the ethical climate within the team, the work environment and institutional infrastructure, positive moderation from leadership, and communication and coordination