Practice Environment Scale: Grid Highlights Opportunities for Improvement

Purpose:
The issue: Presentation of complex data in easily understandable format Goal: Easily understandable visual presentation to identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement

Significance:
The Clinical Practice Environment is linked to staff satisfaction & patient outcomes. The PES scale provides data assessing staff perceptions of the work environment. Easily understandable data for busy nurse leaders facilitates comprehension of data measures & increases translation into action.

Strategy and Implementation:
The innovation is a visual graph made w/Excel,featuring the PES domains. Color coding is used to enhance the understanding of the results. For example, green shading is used to highlight results that fall at or above the median for academic medical centers; red shading is used to highlight results that fall below the median. Color adds visual appeal and affords an ‘at a glance' almost instant understanding of the meaning of the data. Viewing the grid from left to right, by PES domain, the shading serves to call out performance. In all presentations to date, the grid has stimulated interest in the dataset and has led to unprecedented interest in the results and how to leverage the findings to drive improvement. This finding has been most pronounced in the outpatient and interventional settings, areas which previously had expressed minimal interest in the results of the RN survey.

Evaluation:
The innovation has stimulated interest & greater use of the survey results. Nursing leadership have posted the grids in their offices, used the grid to inform future strategy, and used the grid to communicate/collaborate w/Nurse Managers on RN survey findings and action plans.

Implications for Practice:
Improved Practice Environments offer myriad benefits for nurses and patients. Facilitating understanding of and application to survey findings to improvement processes has the power to expedite change.