According to the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) website, this organization is willing to enhance the quality and safety of healthcare through the improved education of future nurses. To make this goal easier to achieve, QSEN created a range of six competencies that focus on “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes” needed to become an outstanding professional (QSEN, 2017, para. 1). Each of them is to be developed in nurses while they participate in pre-licensure programs, which ensures that their practice will be positively affected.
Considering my workplace, the QSEN competencies can be implemented in the following way:
- Patient-centered care. Providing care to various patients, nurses should focus on their needs and peculiarities of their condition, making sure that their preferences are respected even if the members of nursing or medical staff do not agree with them or believe other treatment options to be more beneficial.
- Teamwork & collaboration. Many professionals perform their duties in my healthcare facility, and all of them cooperate with one another from time to time in order to share patient information and ensure that provided services are properly selected instead of being used randomly.
- Evidence-based practice. Even though it is vital to ensure that provided services are aligned with patients’ preferences and needs, attention should also be paid to the current evidence. In this way, all interventions should be supported by information that reveals their successful utilization. Thus, if a patient or his/her family has questions about some procedures, professionals are able to support their decision with relevant data.
- Quality improvement. Nurses always try to make their clients feel better. As a result, they often interview their patients to receive their feedback and develop reports that include their own considerations about particular interventions. On the basis of this information, they identify those elements of care that can be improved; develop and implement initiatives to reach this goal.
- Safety. Both nurses and their patients are at risk of facing issues while healthcare services are provided. In this way, professionals are expected to do their best to minimalize these risks. For instance, making injections, they need to use medical gloves and be extremely careful so that they do not hurt a patient or prick themselves with an already used needle.
- Informatics. Nurses need to share information with each other and with other professionals to develop their knowledge. Currently, such actions are done with the help of technology, as it allows streamlining this process and minimalizing errors. In this way, nurses need to be good at informatics to make notes about a patient condition or to obtain new information needed for treatment.
The discussed competencies are based on those developed by the Institute of Medicine in 2003 that is why they do not differ much (Long, 2003). Even though nurses may have other competencies, depending on their specialization, these ones remain the same for all of them, which allows presupposes that they all are equally important (NP Schools, n.d). Nevertheless, I believe that the provision of patient-centered care is the main competency that should be considered by healthcare providers because other competencies are aligned with it. Everything professionals do is focused on the necessity benefit patients. If nurses cooperate with other staff members successfully but fail to meet clients’ needs and preferences, they will never satisfy them. However, the use of a treatment option that has only potential benefit can be appreciated if those supported by evidence failed.
References
Long, K. (2003). Health professions education: A bridge to quality. The Institute of Medicine Report, 4(4), 259–262.
NP Schools. (n.d.). What are the NP core competencies? Web.
QSEN. (2017). QSEN competencies.