The primary foundation of nursing practice is inclined to the provision of quality care and enhancement of patient safety. The entire nursing fraternity is often compelled to provide the best quality healthcare services by taking into consideration various factors that minimize the possibility of unnecessary errors. This objective can be realized through practical application of QSEN (Quality and Safety Education for Nurses) project. It is a framework aimed at instilling nurses with significant knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will help them handle their current and future challenges. The main essence is to enhance progressive improvement of the safety and quality of healthcare systems. There are various tenets that have been structured to enhance the QSEN competencies. Various healthcare agencies have defined nursing safety and qualities, as well as subsequent proposals for the establishment of pre-licensure programs. Since QSEN competencies are somewhat new, several nurses have a little knowledge base about them. This necessitates them to come up with new skills that center around such competencies. It is hence deemed integral for nurses to take into consideration some of the core competencies and strategies for enhancing patient safety.
QSEN Safety Competencies
The Culture of Safety in Healthcare Organization
Establishment of the appropriate culture of safety is very significant for enhancing the safety and quality of healthcare system. It is one of the elements of QSEN safety competencies enhanced through open communication frameworks and adequate mediums for reporting errors. Safety culture refers to the resultant element of a group and individual values, competencies, attitudes, and behavioral patterns instilled by a top management of any given healthcare organization. An organizational culture sets basis on the history, goals, missions, as well as the current and past leadership frameworks. Healthcare organizations with affirmative safety culture are characterized by open communication frameworks guided by shared perceptions on the significance of patient safety, mutual trust, and greater confidence that strategies for preventing errors work accordingly. It is therefore presumed that high safety culture is a proven guarantee for a high healthcare quality.
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A safety culture of a given healthcare organization is enhanced by putting in place an operational reporting system aimed at encouraging staff members to report process breakdowns, unusual incidents, and many other shortfalls. It is an element that ensures that safe nursing practice is upheld by taking into consideration appropriate actions. As much as individual accountability should be enhanced, greater focus should specifically be placed on detection of system flaws instead of placing blaming a specific individual.
Development and transition of safety culture necessitate a strong and dedicated leadership by the hospital boards, executives, and the staff members. The most significant components of effective safety culture encompass the leadership commitment to safety, as well as employee empowerment through communication, constrained improvisation, non-hierarchical decision-making, rewards and incentives, and training. The nursing association gives emphasis on the need for essential components such as a reporting culture, learning culture, a flexible culture, a cautious culture, as well as an objective culture.
Enhancing a cultural transformation or change within a healthcare setting is often a challenging framework. Ever since, Ever since, nurses have often been treated in different ways when they are involved is some pertinent errors. They have been the ones at the peak of any form of blame or error pertaining patient care and quality. This predicament can be sorted out by the entire leadership and management through the establishment of a just culture valuing reporting. It is a framework whereby any form of errors is openly reported without any fear of contradiction. This builds an organizational culture endowed with greater trust between the organizational leaders and staff members in the process of making a distinction between the blameworthy and blameless. Most importantly, organizational managers, leaders, and staff members are intrigued to learn from a continuous assessment of healthcare safety culture so as to make efforts of enhancing progressive improvement of organizational performance.
In some situations whereby the organizational culture sets precedence on secrecy, professional protectionism, inappropriate submissiveness to the authority, and defensive behaviors, such culture tends to hinder patient safety. There are hence numerous factors that tend to inhibit organizational safety culture. These include; the tendency of a clinician to consider errors as extreme failures that permit blame, greater emphasis on rules instead of knowledge on nursing training, individual punishment instead of system improvement, as well as making assumptions on patient's health when he or she is not injured. These factors emanate from organizations and individuals with unrealistic prospects on clinical perfection.
The act of changing the safety culture of a healthcare organization should start with a concrete assessment and analysis of the present culture, as well as the assessment of the relationship between healthcare quality and organization's culture. Numerous tools for measuring the organization's safety culture have been developed with the essence of informing specific opportunities and interventions for improvement. The main focus is on the scopes of patient safety including management and leadership, teamwork, staffing, communication, and attitudes or perceptions regarding safety, error responses, procedures, and policies. These are some of the tools that can be utilized for enhancing team or individual assessment, or comparison of unit-specific perceptions or organization-wide perceptions.
Strategies for Minimizing Reliance on Memory
Healthcare safety can be greatly enhanced through avoidance of overreliance on memory. There is a need for healthcare organizations to wisely use checklists and protocols when appropriate. The use of checklists and protocols and sensible design ensures routine updates and establishment of appropriate checklists. For instance; the hospital management should develop significant protocols regarding the use of insulin and heparin. The report by the Medicine Institute reiterates on the development of scientific guidelines that suggest significant features for enhancing assessment of guidelines addressing their development processes. Clinical applicability and validity are two examples of significant elements in this case. On the other hand, documentation and clarity of organizational strengths and evidence depicts appropriate examples of the development process
For medications, there are various ways of minimizing overreliance on memory. This includes the use of a software for checking drug-drug interaction; or utilization of dosing cards that include doses of antibiotics, standard order times, formulas for computing pediatric doses, as well as common protocols of chemotherapy. The caution with regards to the use of these protocols is derived from the necessity of generalizing and simplifying the nursing practices. It is also based on the recognition that the entire steps involved in a given protocol are cannot be mutually appropriate. The rapid increase in the knowledge base, as well as subsequent technological advancements, signifies that a framework for regular enhancing regular updates of healthcare protocols should be incorporated into the overall organizational performance.
Conclusion
The future and competency of healthcare organizations are largely dependent on the provision of quality services. Failure to do so is detrimental to the overall safety and care of patients. This objective can be accomplished through the dissemination of adequate nursing practices aimed at upholding greater care and safety. In the current situation, the hospital management and leadership are obliged with the mandate of formulating and implementing significant ways for enhancing healthcare safety in hospitals. From the analysis, it can be ascertained that QSEN safety competencies are the most appropriate frameworks for enhancing the overall performance of healthcare organizations. They articulate essential measures that should be taken into consideration to enhance subsequent nursing practices.
