NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 4 Informatics and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators

A report developed in an ulcer summit revealed that around 60,000 people die due to complicated pressure ulcers. Moreover, approximately 700,000 patients develop pressure ulcers and most of them occur due to inadequate care (Tesfa Mengist et al., 2022). Some of the causative factors for pressure injuries are older age, bladder incontinence, a bedridden state, lack of proper nutrition and water intake, neurological deficiency, pressure on the skin due to medical devices, and multiple secondary diagnoses. As frontline care staff, nurses are primarily responsible healthcare providers with the major responsibility to prevent pressure ulcers by enhancing their knowledge and practices.

Caring for patients’ pressure areas is an imperative element of nursing practices. The nurses must maintain patients’ skin integrity and prevent complications. This is done by early recognition of high-risk patients and providing special attention to them for which nurses must be knowledgeable and have an insight into their poor practices (Ebi et al., 2019). These positive outcomes are better achieved when multidisciplinary teams work together. 

Interdisciplinary Teams’ Role in Collecting and Reporting Data 

Healthcare facilities function with the help of interdisciplinary teams; thus, data collection and establishing an organizational report on quality indicators also require a team of individuals from various professions. Nurses play an important role in this regard. The process of data collection for pressure ulcers (PU) and the knowledge of nurses related to PU include nurses, nurse instructors, the quality control department, the IT department, and administrators if the incidences are high and require hospital management to be involved.

To collect effective data two things are required; a) a pressure ulcer reporting system and b) a questionnaire for nurses. Some of the hospitals in the US have this in-built software called Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS), which is developed for various patient safety indicators (Smith et al., 2018). The purpose of this software is to report every new hospital-acquired incidence of PU or any old pressure ulcers which get complicated during the hospital stay. This reporting system is then audited by the quality control department to identify the high-risk units in the hospital. Then, data is disseminated among the stakeholders of each patient unit to identify the risk factors in nursing care. 

NURS FPX 4040 Assessment 4 Informatics and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators

Another approach to data collection and reporting is by analyzing nurses’ knowledge related to PU. For this purpose, nurses are given a survey questionnaire which is then submitted to the nurse instructors. The data collected from surveys is then transmitted in the statistical software on the computers. It is then compiled in mean and percentages which help to identify the average of nurses who lack knowledge about pressure ulcers and give an idea to instructors for conducting educational training (Ebi et al., 2019). 

The data collected helps in improving patients’ safety through various unit-level and organizational-level interventions thus improving the quality indicators of the organization. Interprofessional team members when working together in their areas of expertise will be able to collect the data effectively, analyze it using various technologies, prepare organizational reports, and bring successful reforms in the organization to improve patients’ safety. 

Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicators for Healthcare Organizations

So as we discussed earlier, nursing-sensitive quality indicators are essential to improve the results of the data collected, eventually enhancing quality care. Healthcare organizations use these indicators for three purposes, 1) improving patients’ safety, 2) enhancing patient care outcomes, and 3) improving organizational performance reports. 

Like other hospitals, our organization is also interested in providing quality care to the patients, especially in terms of decreasing the incidences of  pressure ulcers. Nurses being the frontline care providers have this responsibility to ensure care quality and patients’ safety (Vaismoradi et al., 2020). The data received from NDNQI about the prevalence of pressure ulcers helps nurses and nurse leaders to examine and evaluate current hygiene care practices and the positioning of high-risk patients. Then this information can be used by the nurses to improve their nursing care which eventually impacts positive patient outcomes.

Moreover, hospitals use this data to launch organizational goals for improvements at the unit and hospital level, which improves the overall performance of an organizat