Introduction
Nurses’ actions and attitudes play a significant role in the physical and mental state of their patients. It is hard to disagree that precisely nurses empower patients in the decision-making process and act as advocates for their rights. Consequently, it is essential for nurses to avoid medical errors and make sure that their performance is high. Nowadays, it is expected that healthcare facilities meet and even exceed core measures and set standards, which is why they fill reports and detect successful areas and areas that need to be improved. An effective way to analyze the performance of different areas is to prepare a dashboard. This paper aims to review a sample dashboard, finding the most and less successful areas, and draft a nursing plan for enhancing nurses’ response to pain indicators.
Sample Dashboard Data Analysis
This is a very insightful dashboard in which one may detect a need for specific improvements. It contains information about an extended number of indicators, and many of them showed rather good performance. For example, categories like % BSN, RN Care Hrs, RN Courtesy, LOS, and FIM: Bowel were rather successful and managed to meet or exceed their target in all the reported time periods. Additionally, NHPPD may also be considered successful because this area fell short only in one of the four time periods, and it was not a significant decrease (0,04%).
Nevertheless, the number of not-very-successful areas turned out to be greater. For instance, %AGNCYHR met the target in only one quarter, while in the previous three time periods, there was not enough performance. %PRSSULC appeared to be extremely unsuccessful, having negative 17,16%, 7,69%, and 5,86% variances. Some other areas with shortcomings were % CERT, Attn Spc Needs, Promptness, and Response Pain. The latter is chosen for this assignment to be included in the nursing plan and improved. Response Pain exceeded the target only in the third quarter, falling short by 8,15%, 1,95%, and 2,65% in the first, second, and fourth time periods.
Describing and Discussing the Selected Area
Before discussing the possible interventions to improve the chosen area, it is essential to describe it and explain its importance. One should agree that nurses have an extended number of responsibilities in their care for patients. One such responsibility that is considered both working and ethical is proper pain management. McCaffery notices that, in the nursing profession, pain is “whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he says it does” (as cited in ANA Center for Ethics and Human Rights, 2018, p. 2). Consequently, “nurses and other healthcare professionals have a moral obligation to respond to this patient need” and “provide respectful, individualized care to all patients experiencing pain regardless of the person’s personal characteristics” (ANA Center for Ethics and Human Rights, 2018, p. 2). Sometimes, however, nurses fail to implement proper and successful pain management due to various reasons, including the lack of skills, personal beliefs and prejudices, unreasonable and uninformed patient refusal, or other factors (Schroeder et al., 2016). Inadequate responses to pain can lead to the deterioration of a patient’s condition and the worsening performance of the facility as a whole.
Nursing Plan
As mentioned above, there is a severe necessity to improve the Response Pain area, and there may be several evidence-based interventions to address this need. To begin with, it is possible to educate nurses about their role in proper pain management. As noticed by Schroeder et al. (2016), effective training programs should be very helpful in teaching nurses to adequately respond to patients’ pain. Nurses need to learn that “poor acute pain management can lead to adverse consequences including postsurgical complications and prolonged hospital stays, increasing health care costs, and patient suffering” (Drake & de C. Williams, 2016, p. 4). Consequently, methods like interactive teaching, small group discussions, role-plays, and vignettes of a case or clinical material for nurses to discuss can be effective in educating nurses about proper pain management.
Further, some researchers offer better documentation as a way to facilitate adequate responses to pain among nurses. For instance, according to Boswell & Hall (2019), “when nurses have objective data concerning pain documentation, meaningful and sustained improvements can occur” (p. 10). To improve this area, healthcare facilities are encouraged to use “a modified version of the Samuels Pain Management Documentation Rating Scale (SPMDRS) to assess healthcare provider adherence with pain management documentation” and enhance nurses’ pain responses. Finally, the third intervention would be to educate patients about pain management and their safety. As noticed by Lee and Wu (2020), providing patients with relevant information about their health and the pain they may experience, as well as their actions if they experience pain, may increase the likelihood of patients timely informing nurses in. Therefore, these three interventions can significantly improve nurses’ pain management.
Conclusion
To draw a conclusion, one may say that there are no insignificant areas in healthcare performance, and it is essential to pay attention to each of them in order to enhance patient satisfaction. In the presented dashboard, there were some more and less successful criteria, and response to pain was among the ones that required improvement. In this paper, three evidence-based interventions are offered to enhance pain management area: nurses training, better documentation, and educating patients. Together, they are likely to have a positive impact on nurses’ responses to pain.
References
ANA Center for Ethics and Human Rights. (2018). The ethical responsibility to manage pain and the suffering it causes [PDF document]. Web.
Boswell, C., & Hall, M. (2019). Improving pain management through better documentation. Nursing Made Incredibly Easy, 17(6), 9-12. Web.
Drake, G., & de C. Williams, A. C. (2016). Nursing education interventions for managing acute pain in hospital settings: A systematic review of clinical outcomes and teaching methods. Pain Management Nursing, 18(1), 3-15. Web.
Lee, B. H., & Wu, C. L. (2020). Educating patients regarding pain management and safe opioid use after surgery: A narrative review. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 130(3), 574-581.
Schroeder, D. L., Hoffman, L. A., Fioravanti, M., Medley, D. P., Zullo, T. G., & Tuite, P. K. (2016). Enhancing nurses’ pain assessment to improve patient satisfaction. Orthopedic Nursing, 35(2), 108–119. Web.