It is important to ensure that nursing specialists deliver high-quality, evidence-based care with the highest quality possible within the framework of patient-centered care. The given nursing action plan will primarily focus on improving frontline staff’s awareness of clinical standards and guidelines and strengthen their clinical decision-making. Therefore, the key emphasis needs to be made on the managerial aspects of working with the target category of professionals in order to facilitate a high level of adherence to the fundamental standards of nursing practice and incentivizing a more deliberate as well as effective decision making in the clinical settings.
Competencies Representation
The core of the nursing action plan-based measures aimed at frontline staff and relevant groups is to improve the overall quality of care delivered to the patients. Dismissal or non-recognition of essential clinical standards and guidelines can lead to major declines in the quality of care provided by nursing personnel, which can hinder the overall well-being of patients, such as diminished or improper recovery. It is stated that nursing professionals and “clinicians should strive to provide the highest possible quality of care and to represent their competencies accurately to potential clients” (Waltman et al., 2016, p. 178). In other words, the first key element of such an action plan needs to involve a proper representation of primary and critical competencies, which requires closer monitoring and timely intervention.
The most basic approach can include measures based on informing and educating the nursing specialists through mandatory pieces of training and handbooks, which are designed to either remind or illuminate the vital clinical standards and guidelines. It is evident that such strategic steps might directly promote a moderate to a high level of adherence to the key standards by ensuring that the management is aware and interested in these steps.
Therefore, it can be stated that core competencies representation is of paramount importance for ensuring that the relevant information reminds and educates the nursing personnel on essential standards of practice. The second logical element after the information delivery is a timely and accurate evaluation of performance, which can only be achieved through a system of individual evaluative measures. In other words, nurses need to be assessed on the basis of their adherence to the guidelines on which they were previously informed. Such approaches can involve minor patient analyses and an effective scoring system, which allow the management to be aware of how each nursing specialist is performing their responsibilities as well as the manner of the overall care delivery. However, it should also be noted that the majority of nursing specialists’ time and energy needs to be devoted to the patient and their job satisfaction need to remain unaltered and high. If such interventions lead to a decline in these metrics, the given strategies can become unnecessarily burdensome and ineffective.
Standard Requirement Awareness
Although the core competencies representation can be useful for nursing staff, standard requirement awareness is nonetheless important to enhance the overall knowledge of these guidelines. It is stated that “contributing factors that enable and deter Registered Nurses from fulfilling this expectation to support nursing students in their clinical learning include; workloads, preparedness for the teaching role, confidence in teaching and awareness of the competency requirement to support students” (Anderson et al., 2016, p. 636). In other words, an ideal way to enhance awareness is to promote such measures at the early stages of educational and professional development.
Similarly, the proposed actions can be incorporated into the plan by boosting the educational delivery and consumption aspects of the nursing staff. It is a common practice to include nursing student support as a part of the professional responsibility of a nurse, which will unavoidably invoke a high-level adherence to the taught standard awareness. In addition, providing additional seminars and training sessions for the current nursing professionals can be highly useful in ensuring that they are receiving relevant and timely updates on changes as well as being reminded of the core stance of the management on the clinical standard and guideline awareness elements. Therefore, making the educational delivery and receiving responsibilities part of the nursing job process can ensure that the essential clinical standards are followed to the highest level.
It is important to indicate the fact that the nursing action plan should not include or base on managerial interventions through in-depth control or maximally close-up monitoring because it can cause excessive work stress overload and hinder the workflow of the nursing staff. Such measures are not included in the given action plan in regards to awareness improvement due to it being a last resort if all previously mentioned educative and representative measures fail.
Three Fundamentals of Clinical Decision Making
The nursing staff not only needs to be aware of the key guidelines and standards but also be a part of a more action-driven process of clinical decision-making. In order to ensure that key clinical decisions are made accordingly and appropriately, it is important to understand the primary underlying factors, which catalyze such a change. It is stated that the three core fundamentals of clinical decision-making are integrity, transparency, and data sharing (Wallach et al., 2018). In other words, there is an explicit need for altering the managerial approaches through the incorporation of these metrics of interest. Firstly, integrity is the most evident aspect of proper clinical decision-making, where the nursing staff needs to have open information transfer channels in order to ensure that there are no barriers inhibiting the integrity of the data on which decisions are made.
Secondly, transparency is of critical importance since it ensures openness of communication between the parties of interest. The given fundamental factor is aligned with the need for integrity due to nursing protocols usually being highly complicated and complex, which can lead to major barriers hindering the exchange of essential data. Various elements of a healthcare facility, including the nursing specialists, should aim for a high level of transparency by establishing an open system of flow of vital information between involved data collectors and decision-makers. Thirdly, in accordance with the need for integrity and transparency, data sharing needs to be established through an intervention from the management. In addition, nurses, especially experienced ones, need to be incentivized to adhere to “a reflective, articulate and balanced use of knowledge sources” (Voldbjerg et al., 2017, p. 1313). In other words, the experienced nurses mainly serve as professional models for the entire staff, which is why the strengthening needs to be aimed at these individuals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the action nursing plan needs to include an educative and representative approach to ensure an enhanced awareness of clinical standards, and it also needs to manage core factors of integrity, transparency, and data sharing to strengthen clinical decision-making. All these actions need to be incorporated or implemented strategically without hindering the nursing care delivery process, which means the emphasis should be put on positive reinforcement rather than strict evaluative measures.
References
Anderson, C., Moxham, L., & Broadbent, M. (2016). Providing support to nursing students in the clinical environment: A nursing standard requirement. Contemporary Nurse, 52(5), 636–642. Web.
Voldbjerg, S. L., Grønkjaer, M., Wiechula, R., & Sørensen, E. E. (2017). Newly graduated nurses’ use of knowledge sources in clinical decision-making: An ethnographic study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 26(9-10), 1313–1327. Web.
Wallach, J. D., Gonsalves, G. S., & Ross, J. S. (2018). Research, regulatory, and clinical decision-making: The importance of scientific integrity. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 93, 88–93. Web.
Waltman, S. H., Frankel, S. A., & Williston, M. A. (2016). Improving clinician self-awareness and increasing accurate representation of clinical competencies. Practice Innovations, 1(3), 178–188. Web.