Educational Objectives:
At the end of this poster viewing, the participant will be able to:
1. Identify the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) VA Nursing Outcomes Database (VANOD) Administrative Indicators.
2. Describe how VANOD’s Administrative Indicators provide a decision support system for administrative processes for each of the 157 VA Medical Centers and throughout the system.

Purpose:
The VA Office of Nursing Service VANOD provides essential information for VA Nurse Executives to manage strategic initiatives and policy decisions that include nurse staffing levels and skill mix, demographic information, education levels, and retirement eligibility for all nursing personnel. 

Description of how the session will provide relevant and current knowledge:
The VA is uniquely positioned to automate data extraction for large administrative data sets from common VA systems including: staff hours and costs, skill mix, retirement eligibility, age, gender, years of service and education level for all nursing personnel. These data reside in a national data warehouse and are available for internal comparisons at the national, regional, facility and pay period level. Data automatically updates on a monthly basis. Multiple measures display on one desktop “dashboard” allowing nurse executives and managers to retrieve timely information. Nurse Managers from all points of care (hospitals, clinics, nursing home, home care, etc.) can create relevant customized reports to track and compare trends.Summary of the Presentation:
Administrative indicators have been developed by the VA to display demographics, hours, and costs of nursing staff segmented by nursing roles- administrative, direct care and/or support staff. VA nurse executives have ready access to detailed and timely data to be used for staffing effectiveness measures, succession planning and fiscal accountability. Since data are pulled from common VA files, all data are traceable to the source files enabling facility validation efforts.

Implications for Practice:
Nurse administrators and clinicians need information about allocation of resources. A nursing database can identify trends and areas for improvement. Collection of standardized and consistent nursing sensitive quality indicators will allow comparison within and among VA facilities and outside groups.

Administrative indicator data includes financial (hours, costs, and types of pay) and demographic (retirement eligibility, years of service, educational levels, etc.) components for 61,000 VA nursing employees (RN, LPN/LVN, and UAP).

Facility level efforts are in place to validate the administrative data and VA nurse executives are learning to use data visualization tools to create meaningful reports. Future modifications are planned to display unit level, shift level data, and to capture all nursing costs, including VA and contract/agency staff.

Additional administrative and clinical indicator development is in concert with National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) and National Quality Forum (NQF) endorsed measures.