Evaluating Quality Patient Outcomes, and Discussion of Articles - Essay Example

Give an example of data that can reflect poor quality in care, how can quality improvement be a daily task inpatient care?

Readmission rates and Hospital-specific mortality rate

Quality improvement can be made a daily task in inpatient care through continuous communication and implementation of novel findings among the involved professionals.

Why does continuous quality improvement need to be associated with change?

Quality improvement is a measure taken to achieve better patient outcomes and thus would always involve changes that respond to risk areas established following a review of adverse events.

Part two

Professional Communication and Team Collaboration give an experience of the preset healthcare field. It is true there is a need to work on the challenge of communication among health care professionals, considering the many complexities involved. Such is the case that Professionals within the healthcare field depict different levels of occupational training and education, and would thus require extensive communication and collaboration to achieve the best outcome. According to this article respective healthcare professionals should take a complementary role and work together while sharing the responsibility for solving problems and making decisions. This system of working is associated with increased awareness among team members, especially with regard to the skills and knowledge of each other. Such a system of working leads to continuous improvement in patient care backed by better decision making. On the other hand, poor communication or complete lack of it points to incidences of medical errors that can potentially cause severe injury or in worst cases death of patients. As stated in the article, there is a greater need for clinical practice to go beyond just focusing on the technological system and instead give more attention to the human factor. In this regard, healthcare organizations should work hard to enhance their clinical outcomes by assessing potential drives for poor communication and also encourage collaboration among its professionals (Daniel, & Rosenstein, 2008).

  Nursing practice in the Emergency Department will draw information on the importance of communication and collaboration when trying to minimize errors and achieve the best patient outcome.

The second article “patient’s acuity” presents an important consideration when looking at a patient’s safety.   Despite the scanty information and discrepancies in the available few regarding these issues, this article presents crucial information that can help build a good discussion on how patient acuity, relates to outcomes, and patient safety.  Such is the case that patient’s acuity should be put into greater consideration when seeking to provide better healthcare especially when considering the article’s suggestion that “as acuity rises, more nursing resources are needed to provide safe care.”  It is important to note that despite the study failing to show any relationship between acuity and medication error there were other important relations developed that could potentially affect the patient’s outcome. Here, two studies were consistent in showing a positive result between acuity and other adverse factors like decubiti and infections (Jennings, 2008).

 Nursing practice in the Emergency Department will benefit from the appreciation of patients' acuity relations to particular adverse factors such as infections and decubiti. Additionally, this information will help nurses develop a wider scope in handling their patients, following the knowledge that “other factors other than acuity were more predictive of outcomes.”(pg 2)