Discuss the access, cost, and quality of quality environments, as well as recent quality initiatives (See Chapter 24 and Table 24.1). Student is to reflect on the relationship between quality measures and evaluation and role development. In addition, describe this relationship and note how the role of the APN might change without effective quality measures. Expectations Due: Monday, 11:59 pm PT Length: 1500 words, double-spaced

 

 	
, excluding title and reference pages (required)
 	
Format:  APA 7th Edition

Expert Answer and Explanation
Access, Cost, and Quality for APNs
Nursing professionals play critical role when it comes to the delivery of care, and for patients to receive optimal benefits from the nursing care, nurses have to be competent. This is because the nurse’s competency determines the quality of the clinical services they provide, and it can influence the costs of the medical care. Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) contribute to the advancement of the health care objectives pertaining to access, cost and quality of care. The healthcare priorities, and patients’ needs are changing, and the APRNs have to find new ways of addressing health concerns.

For instance, they can adapt to the new trends by leveraging evidence and technology to promote wellness and prevent illness. The APRNs, when performing their professional duties, have to adopt cost-effective measures (Joel, 2018). By doing this, they can contribute to a healthcare environment that emphasizes quality, access and cost-effectiveness. However, the quality environments can affect APRN’s role as explored in this study.

Access, Cost and Quality of Quality Environment

There have been sustained efforts to transform the United States’ healthcare, and most of these efforts have often focused on key elements which include access, cost, and quality of care. According to (Joel, 2018), these elements are the cornerstones for the delivery of health care, and they have different meanings. Access, for example, means being able to use personal health care in the right time to attain wellness. Conversely, quality takes into account the aspects such as the patient’s needs, and the affordability, effectiveness and safety of care.

Costs entails the amount charged by the providers to deliver care, and it is determined by the nature of the patient’s illness, and the resources used to treat it. The quality environment affects all the aforementioned elements, and it encompasses the systems or programs focused on optimizing the quality of care, mitigating costs, and improving access (Joel, 2018). Quality measures, for instance, can be used to build an environment that encourages the delivery of safe care.

The environment in which an APRN works determines the quality of medical services they provide. For nurses, working in a conducive practice setting, can lead to motivation, and improve their productivity. This kind of environment is characterized by higher levels of job satisfaction, low turnover rates, and reduced burnout. The quality of nursing can equally improve in such a workplace scenario. Retention of nurses means a health facility will have more nurses with experience and knowledge of managing clinical issues.

This in turn will lead to better care. If a clinical facility were to experience high turnover rates, this would culminate to watering down of the quality, and it can jeopardize the safety of care (Harrison, 2015). This emphasizes the importance of creating conditions which encourage the delivery of medical services, and by creating these conditions, providers will be seen as leading efforts aimed at the delivery of compassionate care (Harrison, 2015).

Quality improvement, within the clinical context, entails a methodical process in which the hospital monitors, assesses and improves the health care safety and effectiveness. It is a continuous process that involves review of the implemented strategies or ideas, and making changes as well as pursuing measures focused on optimizing performance. When an organization continuously upgrades and improves the processes and operations, it can experience growth in terms of services it provides, and the models of care it adopts to help provide care.

For example, the upgrade can encourage an organizational culture in which employees use evidence-based practice (EBP). Patient satisfaction go hand in hand with quality considering that the fulfillment of the patients’ needs can lead to the patient being satisfied (MacDorman et al., 2016). To optimize quality, and achieve higher levels of client satisfaction, providers can use ethical principle to guide their actions. Examples include the beneficence and Nonmaleficence.

Recent Quality Initiatives

Recent quality initiatives emphasize the delivery of safe care in a timely manner, and APRNs play critical role in terms of advancing quality initiatives. The use of health technology to guide decision-making is an example of such initiatives, and hospitals are using various informatics systems to perform this task. Providers are leveraging the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for this particular role. The use of evidence-based practice (EBP) is another initiative that hospitals are continuously adopting.

This initiative focuses on using the available research results to inform providers’ clinical decisions. The APRNs’ role fit into these quality initiatives considering that these nurses are at the forefront when it comes to the adoption and implementation of the technology. This is particularly noticeable where they play leadership roles, and they have to come up with solutions to the issues such as the delivery of unsafe care, prolonged hospitalization, and high rates of hospitalization (Boafo, 2018).

Relationship between Quality Measures and Evaluation

Providers can gauge the quality of the care they provide, and when measuring quality, they can either use various metrics including the way the patient perceives health services, the outcomes of the clinical intervention and the met guidelines. Other metrics include reduction in the time of hospitalization, and the structures within the organization.  For instance, one can measure quality by determining the provider-patient ratio. Evaluation is important in the sense that it helps one know whether the quality metrics have been mate.

When evaluating these metrics, a healthcare organization can use various methods including interviews, and peer reviews. They can also observe the way the metrics or the measures for measuring quality change. If an organization wants to reduce the rates of nosocomial infections by one year, for example, it would use the costs incurred in treating infections to measure quality (Bhatt & Bathija, 2018). To use this particular measure to evaluate perform, the organization would examine expenditures at different points such as after every three months.