Ways to Engage your Staff in Quality Improvement

Purpose:
Painting a clear picture of current clinical performance for our staff nurses is a major goal for our organization. This poster will describe how our organization created strategies to make Nurse-Sensitive Indicator data relevant and comprehensible to our direct care nurses.

Significance:
Nurses as direct care providers for patients are responsible for patient care outcomes. Aiken and colleagues (2001) concluded that RNs responsible for direct patient care must be involved in making changes to care practices to appreciate significant, sustainable improvements.

Strategy and Implementation:
Our organization set a goal to paint a clear picture for staff nurses regarding current clinical performance so that they could be actively involved in the process to improve performance.The first step in this process involved using a QI Tool Kit to engage the staff nurses in the NSI creation and development. The tool kit required the bedside nurse to identify an indicator, perform a literature search, and identify a benchmarking organization/goal. The second approach was to help increase staff nurses awareness of their current performance related to patient care outcomes. Our organization created the motto “Going For The Green,” which refers to green or red data points on line graphs indicating a units performance.

Evaluation:
Feedback from our staff and the ability of our staff nurses to speak to the current performance related to NSI on Quality Rounds demonstrated the effectiveness of these two step processes.

Implications for Practice:
The ability to involve staff nurses in the development,ongoing assessment and intervention identification is essential to the success of any NSI program.Using “Going For The Green” line graphs provides a pictorial understanding of where each unit is in relation to the benchmark is easy to identify.