Nurses play a critical role in patient care settings by engaging in various activities that help in improving patient outcomes. Therefore, it is important that nurses be in a position to identify potential gaps in patient care settings and propose potential solutions that can help bridge such gaps and improve patient outcomes (Grove & Gray, 2018). As such, the purpose of this assignment is to present a gap identified at my practicum site. My practicum site is a private clinic located in Sugarland, Houston. The site provides rehabilitative, preventive, and treatment services to the patient.
In recent times, especially with the onset of COVID-19, the facility made efforts to use telehealth to reduce physical visits to the clinic to control and prevent infections. It is worth noting that the facility achieved this aspect as physical visits to the clinic were greatly reduced. However, one problem arose, which is still rising to date. There have been rising cases of patients failing to honor telehealth appointments with healthcare professionals. Patients miss appointments due to various challenges such as internet challenges, technological complexity, forgetting the appointment dates, and in challenges in rescheduling appointments when the time has passed (Kolb et al.,2021). These missed appointments have turned out to be costly to the clinics. For example, one of the results is delays since a patient who could have taken such slots can not take them due to unpredictability. The provider’s time is also wasted, making the facility have reduced revenue. One of the most costly results is that the patients missing such appointments end up having poorer health outcomes.
As indicated, the missed appointments have proven costly to the facility, implying that appropriate solutions should be used to mitigate the problem. The use of phones has significantly grown, and therefore, a solution may be formulated around phones (Johnson et al.,2021). As such, the practice change would be to use automated appointment reminders which are sent as text messages to the patient’s phone before the appointment date. As earlier indicated, most cases of missed appointments were a result of forgetfulness, while those who missed the appointment for no proper reason were also a considerable number. Therefore, the use of automated text messages is expected to reduce the cases of missed appointments.
Various activities will be performed to support the proposed practice change. For example, reminders will be sent at intervals to the patient’s phones. A reminder one week before the appointment, three days before the appointment, one day before the date, six hours before the appointment time, and one hour before the appointment time will be sent to the patient. These reminders should be enough to make the patient realize how important it is to honor their scheduled appointment (Johnson et al.,2021). If need be, a call will also be made to remind the patient to make time for the telehealth appointment or a physical visit to the facility to honor the appointment. Such reminders will also be key in helping the professionals to reschedule appointments in case the patient is not able to honor them, filling the missed chance with the available patient who was to be served next and prompting those who miss their appointment several to visit the facility physically.
The identified practice gap in the practicum setting is missed telehealth appointments. These missed appointments have led to various problems both for the facility and patients. Automated text reminders have been proposed as a practice change to help solve the problem.
Grove, S. K., & Gray, J. R. (2018). Understanding nursing research e-book: Building an evidence-based practice. Elsevier Health Sciences.
Johnson, C., Dupuis, J. B., Goguen, P., & Grenier, G. (2021). Changes to telehealth practices in primary care in New Brunswick (Canada): A comparative study pre and during the COVID-19 pandemic. PloS One, 16(11), e0258839. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258839
Kolb, C. M., Born, K., Banker, K., Barth, P. C., & Aaronson, N. L. (2021). Improving attendance and patient experiences during the expansion of a telehealth-based pediatric otolaryngology practice. Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, 164(5), 952-958.
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