Scholarly activities are essential for advanced practice nurses as they allow them to improve and attain certain competencies as required by the course outlines. These scholarly activities allow advanced nursing students to learn about different issues that impact society and solutions that can help address the issues (Chinn et al., 2021). The scholarly activity that I attended was a quality improvement committee session held in the boardroom of the practicum site. The quality improvement (QI) meeting occurs at least nine times each year with the main purpose of reviewing incident reports and instituting quality benchmarks to reduce events like falls, hospital-acquired infections and injuries, and readmission rates. The meeting happens every last Friday of the month when it falls.
The team leader chaired the meeting and in his absence, the committee appointed a substantive leader. The committee has a secretary who records or takes minutes of the deliberations so that they can monitor and track progress in different aspects of implementation. The meeting targets all employees within the organization, especially those handling acute patients who are susceptible to infections and other adverse outcomes like those who experience pressure injuries or ulcers. Through this scholarly activity, I realized the importance of having quality care provision and integrating patients into care plans to understand their problems irrespective of the severity of their condition.
The agenda of this particular QI meeting was to deliberate on the increasing cases of patient safety and quality issues that included hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs), patient falls, and nosocomial infections in the facility and develop interventions and recommendations to lower their prevalence.
The objectives included;
a). Reducing these events by 50% within the next 60 days
b). Developing effective interventions targeted at patients based on their statuses in the facility
c). Implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) strategies to reduce their prevalence. For instance, the implementation of the care bundle approach for hospital-acquired pressure injuries was extensively deliberated by the team to enhance overall outcomes among patients.
d). Effective communication and development of communication skills that reduce the prevalence of these events or occurrences
The increased prevalence of these events, especially HAPIs) meant that the quality of nursing care was fast-falling in the facility and there was a need for interventions to protect patients. The occurrence of these issues means that the patient satisfaction ratings will fall and the accreditation of the facility through The Joint Commission will suffer irreparably (Oktaria et al., 2023). Through their participation in this activity, nurses take note of the significance of quality improvement for effective and better patient care outcomes. Nurses also get used to quality improvement processes and initiatives in their facilities. They also meet critical course outcomes and competencies that improve their abilities to offer quality care interventions for patients with different concerns and needs.
The committee meeting recommended a raft of measures that nurses and nurse managers could implement to reduce the occurrence of adverse events based on the level of acuity of patients and their respective departments. These included ensuring QI processes that implore nurse managers to review their operating procedures and infection control protocols, the implementation of care bundles to reduce and prevent these events, developing effective communication approaches to improve sharing of information, especially through telehealth and other models like SBAR (situation, background, assessment, and recommendation) which leads to structured and effective communication among all providers and organizational leaders (Grace, 2022)The committee members should also review best practices and existing policies to identify gaps that may be exacerbating the current situation. As such, these solutions are tailored to enhance the management of adverse events and offer nurses sufficient information for better approaches.
The activity offered opportunities for the team and its members to identify the causes and effects of the rise in adverse events like HAPIs, locate appropriate resources to improve and facilitate better nursing care, and offer training and education for nurses to understand the EBP care bundle approach. The meeting provided a chance to understand the different committees and their roles in the faci
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