Nurses’ and the Interdisciplinary Team’s Role in Collecting and Reporting Data Informatics and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators Script
Hello and welcome to East Road Hospital. The Quality Improvement Council at the East Road Hospital welcomes you to the nursing team. In this session, we will discuss how nursing informatics supports nursing-sensitive quality indicators monitoring. Within the tutorial, we will define the National Database of Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicators (NDNQI) and nursing-sensitive quality indicators (NSI) and report an interview with a council member on how this care organization collects and disseminates data on quality indicators. We will also outline the role of nurses in supporting accurate reporting.
Let us start by defining NDQI and NSI. NDNQI is a nursing database that provides periodic reporting on structure, process, and outcome indicators useful in evaluating the level of nursing care in various institutions of care. It enables researchers to identify nursing factors that impact clinical outcomes. NSI, on the other hand, are specific patient outcomes influenced by nursing care. Accordingly, this tutorial will focus on patient falls as a nursing-related quality measure. Nurses and other caregivers play a role in implementing fall prevention measures in the hospital. For this reason, nurses should be familiar with patient falls as a quality indicator in healthcare.
Nurses’ and the Interdisciplinary Team’s Role in Collecting and Reporting Data
Fall prevention is a quality measure that finds relevance in many patient care settings. As a patient quality and safety safeguard measure, nurses and other members of the interdisciplinary team are tasked with creating a safe environment for their patients to minimize their risk of falling. Collecting and reporting data on patients’ falls is pivotal in informing on mitigating measures for fall incidences. With the advent of electronic medical records and automation of patients’ health information, data on falls can also be obtained from the hospital’s electronic databases. Other vital information that may also be obtained from these databases and indicative of a propensity to fall or unnoticed falls includes unexplained fractures or other injuries on the patients, breathing pulse, blood pressure, and fall assessment scores. This information may be vital in informing a suitable course of action.
Fall reporting is another key healthcare provision that informs quality improvement measures. Incident reporting on falls is an approach currently used to gather data on falls (Min et al., 2019). Members of the interdisciplinary teams must document any falls whenever they occur to facilitate investigation into the causal factor for these falls. Coding falls is one of the best reporting practices on patient falls. Code falls are a qualitative investigation that succeeds in fall incidents. The interdisciplinary team plays a vital role in data collection (Min et al., 2019). Their diversity in roles makes them valuable in identifying fall incidents. Working collectively, they can ensure optimal data collection on falls and facilitate prevention measures that ultimately promote patients’ safety.
Patient Falls as a Nurse Sensitive Quality Indicator
Patient falls remain one of the most commonly reported adverse events in the inpatient hospital setting. A combination of patient and care-related factors have been implicated as causal factors for patients’ falls. Patient falls are a source of quality and safety compromise in healthcare. Whenever they occur, they result in severe injury, loss of life, increased costs of healthcare, longer hospital stay days, and patient suffering (LeLaurin & Shorr, 2019). In addition, patient falls are a vital nursing-sensitive indicator as they show the level of nursing care. Higher fall rates correlate to poor quality nursing care. Thus, this indicator is relevant in informing the level and quality of care that the organization offers to their patients
How the Organization Collects Data on Patient Falls
An interview with members of the Quality Improvement Council of this hospital revealed how this hospital collects data on patient falls. The hospital encourages the documentation of falls through incident report books, which are integrated into the hospital EHR systems. A periodic review of these books often indicates the number of falls reported over time. The hospital also encourages members of the multidisciplinary teams to conduct frequent rounding to identify at-risk patients and implement fall prevention measures on them. This way, the hospital has been able to keep the rate of patient falls considerably low.
How the Hospital Disseminates This Data
Upon review of the collected data on falls, the hospital disseminates this data to the hospital’s clinical teams and the administration for follow-up activit