MSNFP6016 Capella University Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Sample Paper Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation As primary caregivers and care coordinators, nur

As a result, nurses suffer from poor nursing outcomes such as burnout and job dissatisfaction that can affect their ability to achieve QI goals. Hence, to ensure a QI initiative’s success, the quality of a nurse’s work environment has to be improved. The importance of nursing quality in a successful QI initiative will be discussed using the example of TrueWill General Hospital (TGH), a multispecialty hospital in the United States.

The hospital launched a QI initiative with the goal of improving patient safety, and thereby patient outcomes, in its medical and surgical units. The initiative’s framework was based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Triple Aim, which is an approach to optimize health system performance by the simultaneous pursuit of three aims (IHI, n.d.).

However, early evaluations showed that the initiative led to poor nursing outcomes. As nursing performance declined, patient outcomes deteriorated as well, which contradicted the initiative’s goal.

In the QI initiative evaluation, the units’ nursing workforce will be analyzed for quality issues that may have been caused by the Triple-Aim-based initiative. The objective is to examine how nursing quality influences patient outcomes, which patient outcomes are most affected, and what quality benchmarks or measures are relevant to the success of the QI initiative.

Based on the findings, the report will recommend more protocols and indicators that will overhaul the QI initiative and improve the initiative’s clinical and organizational outcomes.

Analysis of the Quality Improvement Initiative

The QI initiative at TGH started with a series of reforms to promote the three Triple Aim goals to address existing safety issues in the medical and surgical units. The Triple Aim’s three goals—improve the health of the population, improve patient experiences, and reduce per capita cost of health care (IHI, n.d.)—were implemented in primary care or care given by nurses and physicians.

Initially, the hospital achieved QI benchmarks in the medical and surgical units— adverse events decreased, patient satisfaction increased, resources and infrastructure utilization optimized, and health care costs reduced. However, the Triple Aim’s patient-centric goals overworked the units’ nurses and put them under a lot of stress.

They had trouble balancing their clinical duties with other aspects of their jobs such as mentoring new staff, undertaking self- improvement plans, auditing the units, and compiling reports for the senior management.

High levels of job dissatisfaction among the units’ staff, especially nurses, affected their ability to ensure quality in patient care, which had costly implications on the hospital such as high nursing turnover rates and shortages in the units. As a result, the existing nursing staff were unable to manage their patient panels, forcing them to work longer hours in the units.

Delays in the review and follow-up of laboratory results increased the length of inpatient and outpatient stays and burdened the limited facilities and resources such as beds and medical equipment.

Burnout reduced the nursing staff’s adherence to treatment plans and made them less empathetic toward patients. The overworked nurses were also unable to notice important changes in their patients’ conditions (Bodenheimer & Sinsky, 2014).

The analysis of the QI initiative reveals the fact that an inefficient initiative can adversely affect nursing outcomes, which is detrimental to quality care and patient safety. The quality of the analysis can be improved with more data that bridge knowledge gaps or areas of uncertainty. For example, the data gathered from early evaluations do not provide details about the educational qualifications of the nursing workforce or the kind of training they have received.

Hospitals with inadequately trained nurses and unlicensed nurses have more patient safety issues and poorer staff outcomes. Furthermore, early evaluations do not mention the hospital’s investments in improving the quality of nursing staff and other primary care providers (Aiken et al., 2014). Further evaluation can bridge these gaps in knowledge and provide evidence that supports the QI initiative’s improvement.

The next step in the evaluation is assessing the success of the QI initiative against recognized measures, outcomes, and benchmarks. The evaluation will also justify why nurses are the most relevant staff group to the QI initiative’s success using certain assumptions about nursing. Concepts such a