Hourly Rounding in the ED by Staff - Research Paper Example

One answer to this conundrum is hourly patient rounding, which shows promise in the achievement of both nurses and patient satisfaction. Positive outcomes of this system depend on the level of satisfaction felt by both the patient and his parents, as well as by the nurses. The earlier proposal dealt with the improvement of client satisfaction in the paediatric hospital’s emergency department. The study aimed at researching ways in which client satisfaction could be improved. It showed that in order for paediatric hospitals to offer optimal ED services, and also gain the guardians and children’s satisfaction, they needed to tie the rounds with clinical care, treatment procedures, nursing services, and waiting time.

However, the proposal did not research on the satisfaction of Registered Nurses. This paper seeks to study satisfaction in the system from a nurse’s point of view and the effect on the patients. A previous study was conducted on the assessment and comparison of a paediatric hospital ED’s overall department for both patients and their guardians (Nathan, 2002). It aimed at identifying healthcare aspects that influenced this group’s satisfaction. At the end of their ED care, questionnaires were administered, with survey instruments using a pain rating scale and an interval scale of six points.

The questions involved their perception of interactive quality wit the attending doctors, adequacy of availed information, the child’s pain resolution, correlation between actual and estimated waiting times, as well as a comparison between fear, satisfaction and pain. The study validated earlier studies that had found a correlation between satisfaction of patients and interactive quality with ED personnel, adequacy of availed information, and, for the guardians, the time spent waiting for room placement, as well as that spent waiting to be attended by a physician.

The study did not find a correlation to the total time sent in the ED (Nathan, 2002). The study found that pain resolution was associated significantly with patient satisfaction in the ED, which could be addressed via hourly rounding. However, this study did not deal with the satisfaction of the nurses, who are just as important in pain resolution through hourly rounding. The study discussed below used patients and nurses as the study group at the Hillcrest Medical Centre. An hourly patient rounding system was initiated at the Hillcrest Medical Centre in Tulsa (Melnyk & Fineout, 2010).

Before the system was implemented, the Nursing Manager pondered the facilitators, barriers, and implications of the system that he needed to consider in order making it a success. After holding several strategy planning meetings with his nursing staff, the unit was able to pilot hourly rounding, scripting, outcomes, facilitators, barriers and procedures. The piloting procedure consisted of several sections (Frampton & Charmell, 2009). The unit was split into two, where one side consisted of techs and nurses who were to perform q1 hour rounding, while on the other side were nurses who gave nursing care in their usual manner.

They also mounted a miniature small white board for every room so that the nurse attending the patient could write their name on it. Afterwards, the desk secretaries could tally the number of patients that made distress calls from both sides. In addition, the techs and nurses were in possession of a clipboard in every time which consisted of a time chart on which they registered each hourly round made. The techs were