Journal of nursing care quality
-
The Post Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU) visitation program of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center needed revision. The process was disorganized, visits were unescorted, and nurses and physicians were resistant. ⋯ As a result, staff attitudes changed, and nurses now contact the family within 90 minutes of the patient's arrival to the PACU to develop an individualized visitation plan. Morale is high, and nurses take pride in meeting the needs of patients and families.
-
Dissatisfaction with doing a yearly written test to evaluate competency in the management of cardiopulmonary arrest led to our exploration of ways to change our processes at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center. Guided by our Mission, Vision, and Values, we strove to create a process that would deliver exceptional health care to our patients, while contributing to the personal and professional growth of our staff. ⋯ Therefore, it is difficult for staff to feel comfortable and maintain competence in these situations. A process was implemented incorporating a hands-on approach to manage a simulated cardiopulmonary arrest on an annual basis for registered nurses (RNs) and assistive staff. The opportunity for hands-on practice and skill development has enhanced the confidence of RNs and assistive staff, affording them the ability to handle real emergencies.
-
Patient functional activity and mobility are essential to recovery and minimization of the risks associated with immobility in hospitalized patients. In practice, there is inconsistency in attending to this aspect of patient care and limited information in the literature to guide clinicians caring for medical-surgical patients. An interdisciplinary quality improvement team of nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and patient care assistants developed a programmatic approach to the assessment, planning, and implementation of patient activity criteria in this patient population. Increased awareness and application of the patient activity criteria have improved the consistency with which patient activity is addressed and reduced the incidence of immobility-associated complications.
-
Multicenter Study
Spanish validation of an instrument to measure the quality of nursing care in hospital emergency units.
The article describes the translation and adaptation to Spanish of the Consumer Emergency Care Satisfaction Scale (CECSS), an instrument used to measure the quality of care nurses give in emergency units. Bilingual people using a translation-retrotranslation process performed the adaptation. ⋯ Content validity (judgment of expert nurses and patients) obtained a mean item-dimension suitability valuation of 6.1 and item-scale suitability of 5.5. As the Spanish version of the CECSS is comprehensible to patients, and reliability and validity are satisfactory, it provides a useful measure of the quality of nursing care.
-
Comparative Study
Length of stay reduction: two innovative hospital approaches.
As staffing limitations and reimbursement constraints challenge hospitals to provide effective care, the development of greater clinical efficiency has become imperative. One promising alternative in this area is the reduction in hospital lengths of stay. This study describes two different efforts at length of stay reduction implemented by large general hospitals in Syracuse, New York. ⋯ The other approach, employed by St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center, focused on the use of physician education and the periodic distribution of individual length of stay profiles. Each of these approaches has generated notable successes in the reduction of inpatient acute care lengths of stay.