The primary objective of Quality and Safety Education competency for Nurses (QSEN) is to equip future nurses with the knowledge, competent skills, and the right attitude to enhance healthcare quality and safety measures continuously. QSEN faculty and a National Advisory Board have set out quality and safety competencies for nursing. The Boards have laid out competency targets for knowledge, skills, and attitude to be eligible for pre-licensure programs (QSEN Competencies, 2020).
Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered care carefully acknowledges the patient as a person in control of the type of care administered. Also, a nurse provides empathetic and harmonized care, considering the patient’s preferences and choices. Patient-centered care designs ways to tackle health and illness affecting an individual by expanding patient involvement, raising awareness, providing support, comfort, confidence, and reassurance (Zhao et al., 2016). Furthermore, communicating empathically and assertively is essential as a communication skill during encounters with patients or families. Lastly, mutually setting boundaries of therapeutic patient-centered care to appreciate mutual decision making between patients, nurses, and families is important to the care process.
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Teamwork and Collaboration
It requires open communication, mutual respect, and shared informed decisions within the nursing and inter-professional (doctor) teams to give quality care. Interprofessional education is important in keeping open communication and share about patient’s progress to have effective collaborations and improve health results. Hence, knowing one’s limitations and robustness is vital in initiating self-development as a team member to contribute constructively.
Evidence-based Practice (EBP)
EBP incorporates both scientific evidence and expertise as well as patient’s or family’s preferences/choice to arrive at a conscious treatment that delivers the best health care. The role of caring revolves around determining the best clinical practice that seeks to incorporate new evidence into the nursing practices and improve based on further new integrated information (Schaefer & Welton, 2018). Integrating unique expertise helps deliver quality care that considers the wishes of the patient to make them comfortable with the treatment. Also, discussing the strengths and relevance of the additional knowledge is influential in the care that will be delivered and perceiving the viability of the outcomes.
Quality Improvement (QI)
QI uses monitored information from outcomes of care procedures and applies improvement methods to outline and test changes to consistently improve the quality and safety measure of health care. The health care profession (nursing) uses flow charts and cause-effect diagrams to analyze the actual cause of health complications. Implementation of the QI models is essential in giving the best care possible. QI model includes the Care Model and the Lean Model, which provides the basis for improving patient care. Their other models mostly focus on the monitoring process of patents outcomes, and they are Model for improvement, FADE, and Six sigma.
Safety
Safety lessens the risk of harm and hazard to patients and improves patients’ healthcare and individual performance. Nurse bedside vigilance is a requisite to the ability to guarantee a patient’s safety. Safety hazards can occur when the ratio of nurses to patients is significant, which can lead to increased work stress and risk burnout, which can ultimately lead to errors from the nurses. Burnouts have been heavily linked with patient safety risks that lead to mistakes while providing routine care (Nursing and Patient Safety, 2019). Safety enhanced medical technology such as computerized provider order entry can be used to maintain the records of the patients and prevent mix-ups even when the nurses are exhausted.
Informatics
Informatics enables effective and efficient decision-making by applying technology to assertively communicate, manage information, and reduce chances of error. Moreover, having good records in a database is key in accessing the medical records of patients instantly and evaluating their medical history. Also, computerized provider order entry is critical in keeping all the medical appointments of attended and unattended patients. Appreciation and application of technology are impactful in supporting safe processes of care, and thus medical professionals are encouraged to learn technology skills. For example, an infusion pump uses a built-in software set up by a trained nurse to deliver fluids.
References
QSEN Competencies. (2020). Retrieved 28 September 2020, from https://qsen.org/competencies/pre-licensure-ksas/
Nursing and Patient Safety . (2019). Ahrq.Gov. https://www.psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/nursing-and-patient-safety
Schaefer, J. D., & Welton, J. M. (2018). Evidence-based practice readiness: A concept analysis. Journal of Nursing Management , 26 (6), 621–629. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12599
Zhao, J., Gao, S., Wang, J., Liu, X., & Hao, Y. (2016). Differentiation between two healthcare concepts: Person-centered and patient-centered care. Journal-of-nursing , 2352 , 0132.
