Interpersonal collaboration in healthcare is important for a variety of reasons. It improves patient care outcomes, reduces errors in practice, makes the treatment processes faster, reduces the inefficiencies inherent in healthcare systems, and improves the relationship between staff at the health facilities, thus improving job satisfaction. However, interpersonal collaboration demands the participation of the individual nurses in the explication of their duties. As such, each nurse has a significant role to play. Their participation should be guided by a step-wise process that understands the systems. This role description is suited for a nurse who is part of an implementation team. It provides a brief that utilizes the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) stages, namely: planning, analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation (post-implementation support).
Implementation of projects in nursing is a complex process that must be approached with care. This brief will use a mock example of the implementation of a program to reduce nosocomial infections at a health facility. However, the model is applicable to the implementation of any other project related to nursing in the health facility.
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The nurse must be active in the planning phase to ensure that they move in unison with the teams during the analysis stage and other subsequent stages. Planning for the implementation must be meticulous and informed by data from various departments (Unhelkar, 2016). The healthcare system in any healthcare facility involves the collaboration of numerous departments that feed the practitioners with information and complement their service delivery. For example, the nurse must liaise with the record-keeping department, the sanitation department, and the management to ensure that they get the necessary information related to the patients, they have the facility clean, and the management is aware of any healthcare-related infection prevalent in the system.
The nurse must open up for collaboration with other nurses and engage in an analysis of the situation. At this stage, the nurse should collect facts related to his or her department, scrutinize the problems in question, and start thinking about solutions (Taylor, 2004). The importance of the analysis stage is that it provides the platform to evaluate the system to understand the underlying issues. As such, the system must be broken down in relatively small sections that can be easily understood, and then engage the implementors in the examination of the issue in question. In this case, nosocomial infections are numerous, and when seeking to address them, the health facility must break down all cases of infections, determine their nature, the departments affected, and the systems in need of development to reduce them. During analysis, numerous departments may be consulted for assistance.
The nurse should give active contributions related to his or her department during the design stage. The implementation team requires the input of every team member. The design stage is when the problems identified in the analysis stage are described in detail (Post and Anderson, 2006). For example, for a team attending to nosocomial infections, the details may include that the hospital stay of patients in ICU is prolonged by over five days in relation to the data from previous years. The possible infections may thus be elaborated, including infection on the wounds of operation and slow healing for such patients. These details will inform the implementation team that the department of operation needs to sanitize properly, or the ICU care systems need to be improved to improve patient recovery.
The role of the nurse during implementation is to ensure that they achieve the changes that they desired to have during the analysis and design stages. The stage of implementation is the actualization of the ideas that have been conceived and shared by nurses from various departments. During this stage, the nurse should have a checklist that marks the problematic areas that have been addressed and those that have not been attended. The areas attended should be checked to meet the standards that are required (Marakas and George, 2010). The areas that are lacking in the implementation should be highlighted, and the plan to address them must be shared. For example, in nosocomial infections, the first stage may be installing hand washing points in patient care rooms, improving ventilation, and educating the nurses. If any of these are not achieved, then they must be highlighted and addressed with the caution they deserve.
The role of the nurse in the evaluation stage is to test the sustainability of the implemented changes. Post-implementation support is important in providing information necessary for supporting the system, revising it, or changing it entirely. Implementation of aspects that cannot be maintained should be removed and financially sustainable measures employed instead (Blanchard and Fabrycky, 2006). The role of the nurse is tracking the progress of the changing, documenting the successes and the failures, and then sharing with the team to access how these aspects can be improved. In the case example, the recovery rates can be tracked for the ICU patients and the rates of successful recoveries compared to data from previous periods. The nurses thus have a significant role to play in every stage, from planning to the implementation, and also in the then post-implementation stage.
References
Blanchard, B., and Fabrycky, W. (2006). Systems engineering and analysis . New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Marakas, A., and George M. (2010). Management information systems . New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. pp. 485–489
Post, G., & Anderson, D. (2006). Management information systems: Solving business problems with information technology . New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Taylor, J. (2004). Managing Information Technology Projects.
Unhelkar, B. (2016). The Art of Agile Practice: A Composite Approach for Projects and Organizations. CRC Press.
