Creative Change Within Organizations - Research Paper Example

? HCS/587 Creating Change within Organizations Introduction Hospitals have been experiencing various challenges, some of which have led to ravaging financial loses. These loses have been attributed to the changes in the compensation policies. The other challenges that hospitals face include; the drastic continuous technological changes, changes in the population, changes in economic trends, the transparency and quality of care concerns and the competing leadership team demands which cause additional problems. This is shown through the Ochsner Health System, which has been put to financial danger by a foreseen government payment reduction of a minimum of 3% over the next half a decade. These challenges have called for bold changes in the hospital job setting. These changes have to be put in place to ensure sustainability, affordability and the quality of the hospital care delivery system. “Care Partner Model” the new Ochsner’s designed care delivery model will aid in ensuring the quality of service delivery is improved. This will be by collaborating a registered nurse and a learning practical nurse to provide nursing care to the patients. This process will be represented in 4 stages. Body Summary: Monitoring of the Care Partner Model takes place through meetings held twice a month by a research team. There are various methods that can be used to monitor implementation of the Care Partner Model. Data collection by data collectors is one of them. This monitoring will involve assessment of direct care costs incurred in attaining the CPM objectives, pod efficiency; number of RN/RN pods per pay period; RN or LPN used in a different capacity and agency remunerations. The information collected by the data collectors will be fed into excels spreadsheets and safely kept in a computer that’s possessed by the principal investigator. Then the data collected will undergo analysis, which will include frequencies and distributions to describe the sample characteristics and variables of interest. The data analysis will also include suitable statistical correlations and associations. To analyze the disrupted time series data, segmented regression and auto regressive integrated moving average will be used. This will also include the death rates, length of stay, readmits, staffing mix, falls, pressure ulcers and failure to rescue. Where suitable variables of interests will be described using the frequencies and measures of. The Care Partner Model promotes more dynamic, directed and purposeful nurse/patient relationship. This is because the nurses are a key to the care delivered within the hospital setting. A research by Hendrich, Chow, Skierczynsky and Lu established 75% of nurses’ time is spend on nursing practice related activities and only about 15% of this time was spent in direct patience care. (Hendrich, 2008). Out of every five, two full time staff nurses responding to the demands of the system is considered wasteful rather than spending time in direct patient care. (Krichbaum, 2007). The objective of the proposed change project is to assess the changes in patient and staff outcomes, work flow and financial indicators associated with the implementation of the Care Partnership Model. Thus better staff and patient outcomes factor the proposed change. For readiness of the proposed change, the Ochsner Health system will have to be partnered with a nationally recognized consultant to aid with defining the job of nursing. The medical/surgical units that were selected for the pilot will have to undergo through interviews and extensive observations. (MD, 2008) How to determine the effectiveness of the proposed change and how to measure the quality, cost and satisfaction outcomes: Effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed change refers to the variables that are used to indicate the progress of the change towards the set goals and objectives. In this context, there are various indicators of the effectiveness of the change and how the efficiency can be determined. This efficiency can be used interchangeably to refer to the profitability of the organization, the patient satisfaction as well as the employee satisfaction i.e. the nurses. The effectiveness of the change cannot be measured by a single measure as it is multidimensional. This will be determined through the patients’ satisfaction, the skill variety in carrying out a task by the nurses, the relationship between the nurses and the quality control of the services offered by the nurses. Again, all these measures will be determined through the various ways of gathering data which include through observation, carrying out interviews in the respective departments within the hospital. The patients’ satisfaction will be enhanced by good nurse/patient relationships. This will boast the relationship as the patient will be free with the nurse and again due to this good relation, the nurses will offer quality care services to the patients. The skill variety will provide a wide pool of knowledge on how the services by the nurses can be improved. The combination of the highly skilled nurses (the registered nurses) and the semi skilled nurses (Learning practical nurses) provides a good experience to both of the nurses and this will be a stepping stone to achieving the set objectives and can be used as a measure to check the efficiency of the proposed change. The relationship between the nurses i.e. between the Registered Nurses and the Learning practical nurses can be used as a criterion to measure the efficiency of the proposed change. This is because the RN’s tend to be bossy and treat the LPN’s as their juniors and are always opposed to the idea of working together with their juniors. A good relation between the two will thus indicate embracement of the Ochsner’s Care Partner Model and the proposed change. Efficiency can be used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed change. Efficiency in this matter refers to the number of patients that will be served within a given period of time. High efficiency with quality services by the nurses will be a good indication of the effectiveness of the Ochsner’s Care Partner Model change proposal. This is because the Ochsner’s model shows that RNA can serve six people while the CAN can serve as many as ten patients. The collaboration of these two nurses shows that they will improve on the number of nurses that can be served. Conclusion: Evidence that links more nursing time per patient day with better patient outcomes has sprung up (Needleman, 2002). Several important reports emphasize the need for improving patient outcomes and have set goals for improving the relationship between the patients and their providers. According to Needleman (Needleman, 2011), death rate was negatively affected by staffing of RNs below target levels and patient movement. Linda Aiken (Kendal-Gallagher, 2011) recently established that specialty certification and baccalaureate-educated nurses have the potential to decrease the incidence of patient death rate and the failure to rescue. Till to date, research has been inconclusive on the relationship of nursing attributes to patient outcomes. Future research is required to understand the work of nursing and how nurses spend their time. Changes are needed for the transformation towards increased reliance on human dimensions and communication skills and establishing relationships. (Redman, 2005). The interviews and observations carried out will be used in measuring the effectiveness of the proposed change. References: Hendrich, A. C. (2008). How Do Medical-Surgical Nurses Spend their Time? Permanent journal, 12(3), 25-34. Kendal-Gallagher, D. A. (2011). Nurse specialty certification, inpatient mortality and failure to rescue. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 43(2), 188-194.. MD, S. S. (2008). American Nurses’. In The Magnetic recognition program application manual. Nursebooks. Needleman, J.B, (2002). Nurse Staffing levels and the quality of care in hospitals. New England journal of medicine, 346(22) Needleman, J. B. (2011). Nurse staffing and inpatient hospital mortality. New England Journal of Medicine, 364(11), 1037-1045 Redman, R. (2005). Patient-centered care: An unattainable ideal? Research and Theory for Nursing Practice: An international Journal, 25(4), 299-309 Read More