Accountability for Clinical Outcomes and Promoting Safety and Quality Essay

Accountability for Clinical Outcomes and Promoting Safety and Quality Essay

Accountability for Clinical Outcomes and Promoting Safety and Quality Essay

Patient safety is one of the primary goals of patient care and quality management. To attain a positive patient care outcome, several guidelines and standards have been developed to help clinicians promote the provision of quality and safe care services (Kotala & West, 2018). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and The Joint Commission (TJC) are among the numerous organizations working together in the development of policies and regulations aimed at promoting safe and quality care for optimal clinical outcomes.

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In August 2007, the CMS announced that Medicare services will no longer cater for additional costs resulting from several preventable errors, such as the ones considered ‘Never Events’ (Lam et al., 2018).Consequently, ever since 1995, TJC has recommended for hospitals and clinics to report ‘sentinel events,’ which are described as unexpected occurrences which lead to death, injury, or put the patient’s lives at risk. The two policies have helped promote the safety and quality of care provided.

Nurses play a significant role in promoting desirable clinical outcomesby observing the outlined standards for quality and outcome measurements. Given that nurses spend the most amount of time with the patient, they must display safe and quality care practices to promote patients’ experience in the given healthcare organization (Dunton & Fisher, 2021). However, nurses tend to face several challenges when trying to influence change in quality improvement. The main nurse-specific challenges include convincing stakeholders of the relevance of the problem, securing sustainability, acquiring accurate data to support the change, and incentivizing participation (Craig et al., 2020). With the above challenges, most of the proposed change initiatives are ignored by the healthcare organization, leading to unresolved gaps in the provision of safe and quality care by the organization. As a result, when evaluating the overall performance of the healthcare organization, the patient experience turns out to be low, preventing the organization from achieving its strategic agenda.

References

Craig, K. J. T., McKillop, M. M., Huang, H. T., George, J., Punwani, E. S., & Rhee, K. B. (2020). US hospital performance methodologies: a scoping review to identify opportunities for crossing the quality chasm. BMC Health Services Research, 20(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05503-z

Dunton, N., & Fisher, A. (2021). Organizational Outcomes: Financial and Quality Measures. In Nurses Contributions to Quality Health Outcomes (pp. 239-254). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69063-2_14

Kotala, R., & West, D. J. (2018). Performance of Hospitalists and Inpatient Clinical Outcomes. Hospital topics, 96(4), 102-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/00185868.2018.1488547

Lam, M. B., Figueroa, J. F., Feyman, Y., Reimold, K. E., Orav, E. J., & Jha, A. K. (2018). Association between patient outcomes and accreditation in US hospitals: observational study. BMJ, 363. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k4011

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Accountability for Clinical Outcomes and Promoting Safety and Quality

Introduction

Throughout your education, patient safety and improving the quality of patient care have been examined. Through numerous readings and media pieces, you have heard about Never Events. These are serious and costly medical errors that are preventable, such as wrong-side surgery, medication errors, and hospital-acquired infections. Each of these types of medical errors is preventable. The consequences of such errors are now financial as well as legal and emotional. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services no longer reimburse for medical errors classified as Never Events.

As a nurse, how can you help to prevent these types of medical errors? What is your accountability for clinical outcomes? There are standards and core measures in place that guide nursing practice. In addition, the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) examines those components of clinical care that are specific to nursing. The NDNQI quantifies, or assesses, these nurse-sensitive components and provides specific feedback on how well nursing practice is being executed in those areas related to patient care.

This week, you will consider a series of articles that focus on strategies for ensuring safety and quality care for patients. You will also explore how successful, efficient teamwork between nurses, nursing leaders, physicians, and other medical personnel can help prevent many of the Never Events from occurring and decrease the likelihood of such events in the future.

Learning Objectives
Students will:
Analyze the core measures and standards for nursing practice that promote patient safety and quality of care outcomes
Analyze the impact of the nurse’s role in clinical outcomes for organizations
Analyze nurse-specific challenges for influencing change in quality improvement
Analyze the role of the nurse in supporting the organization’s strategic agenda in improving clinical outcomes

Promoting Safety and Quality

In the article “Managing to Improve Quality: The Relationship Between Accreditation Standards, Safety Practices, and Patient Outcomes,” the authors discuss the growing trend by medical insurance companies to eliminate reimbursement for Never Events. As these types of mistakes should be easily preventable, hospitals have developed protocols to lessen or extinguish the occurrence of these events. In addition, The Joint Commission (TJC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have developed core measures to guide health care providers’ efforts in improving patient safety and the quality of care delivered.

Health care organizations have developed strategic agendas to help meet these standards and reduce the incidence of Never Events. Nurses significantly influence the overall quality of health care provided and play a pivotal role in improving patient outcomes.

For this Discussion, you will consider the standards that are in place for nurses and how they can be used to improve quality of care.

To prepare for this Discussion:

Review the information at the Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services websites on the core measures and standards presented in this week’s Resources.
Consider the nurse’s role in supporting the organization’s strategic agenda as it relates to improving clinical outcomes.
Conduct an Internet search for either a Never Event or a core measure and select one to address in your post.
By Day 3