Introduction
Good communication skills of health practitioners are critical to providing effective patient care and can result in favorable outcomes such as decreased stress, guilt, discomfort, and illness symptoms. Furthermore, they have the potential to promote patient experience, acceptance, adherence, and collaboration with the medical team. However, poor communication happens at my present workstation when nurses fail to submit concise reports for the next shift. As a result, the nurse-patient relationship significantly impacts health delivery, and a dearth of communication competence harms client care. The use of the Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation (SBAR) method, safe working checklists, and virtual simulation training to improve nurse communication minimizes hospital readmission rates, nonadherence to daily care routines, and duration of hospital stay.
Need and Expected Outcome for Quality Improvement
Communication with patients is essential in all aspects of care and nursing. This is because patients consider interaction with nurses to be critical to their therapy. Furthermore, through dialogue, nurses learn about their patient’s needs, enabling them to offer high-quality access to care. When a nurse refuses to provide adequate information on the patient to an incoming shift nurse, the inbound nurse may be unaware of what occurred while they were not present. Moreover, communication allows family and relatives who are unable to attend the rounds to voice their concerns and ask questions regarding the care plan. As a result, if communication quality can be improved, many medical mistakes can be avoided. For instance, such medical errors as misdiagnosis, wrong patient profiles recording, unaccounted medicine administration, and hospital-acquired infections can be avoided with improved communication. Therefore, communication should entail reducing delays in treatment, increasing follow-up after medication, and adequate monitoring after hospital-related procedures.
Support for the Quality Improvement Initiative and Projected Outcomes
Staff members must have a better knowledge of the patient’s situation. Communication in hospitals, according to Min Sun et al. (2021), is more than merely obtaining information. This implies that communication must be organized, consistent, and reinforced regularly for everyone to have a common knowledge of the patient and treatment plan. The SBAR procedure was used to examine nurse communication in nursing homes, according to Min Sun et al. (2021). It was carried out in medical and surgical facilities, taking into account re-admission risk assessment and daily interdisciplinary rounds. At-depth interviews were performed with 28 multidisciplinary experts working in four nursing facilities. Four important variables for function-focused multidisciplinary staff communication in nursing homes emerged. An accurate understanding of aberrant conditions is required for effective nursing care to sustain function among nursing home patients. To address circumstances needing action and identify the difficulties underlying a resident’s present status, evaluation and resident background knowledge are required. Practitioners sharing responsibilities and duties through referrals produce the best therapeutic environment.
Communication among nurses for quality assurance is critical for patient satisfaction. Dykes et al. (2017) performed a series of studies to investigate the treatments required to improve team communication and patient and nursing partner involvement in the ICU. The study focuses on the efficacy of patient-centered care and involvement programs in intensive care units. Interventions were carried out with the use of structured patient-centered care and inclusion-training program, as well as internet-based technologies such as an ICU safety checklist, a messaging app, and tools for collaborative planning. Patients and caregivers may see, engage in, and interact with clinicians via the site. According to the research findings, organized team communication and patient participation reduced adverse events, increased patient and care partner satisfaction, and decreased adverse outcomes.
Nurse communication is critical for reducing death rates among older patients in Intensive Care Units (ICU). Vukoja et al. (2021) examined the efficacy of a checklist for early diagnosis and therapy of acute illness, as well as an injury-decision assistance tool, during ICU admittance and nurse’s ward rounds. During the interdisciplinary rounds, intensive care units were chosen at random and exposed to a quality improvements exercise such as a daily checklist and goal setting. The pre-implementation phase had 1,447 patients, while the post-implementation phase included 2,809 patients. From 2013 to 2017, 34 ICUs (15 nations) participated in this before-and-after research. Data were gathered 3 months beforehand and 6 months after the adoption of the Checklist for Early Recognition and Treatment of Acute Illness and Injury and evaluated using post hoc analysis. A quality enhancement involvement using isolated simulation training to apply a decision assistance tool was linked to lower non-compliance to daily care routines, reduced lengths of hospitalization, and lower death rates.
Fostering Collaborative Working Relationships
Developing collaborative working connections enables complicated settings to be managed more effectively. Working relationships are built on the capacity for health-related error resolution. Dealing with medical errors needs the development of skills and tactics for successfully balancing interests and communicating. Mediation techniques are helpful for resolving medical errors and establishing cooperative partnerships (Labrague et al., 2022). These strategies are readily transferrable to the clinical environment with experience. By looking for understanding, rethinking, raising the problem’s definition, and making clear agreements, one can build collaborative partnerships, reduce conflict, and create healthy work environments for both patients and nursing professionals. Therefore, healthcare organizations, through collaborative working, ensure that hospital readmission, length of stay at the hospital, non-compliance to daily care routines, and rate of mortality are reduced.
Collaborative working enhances coordination and communication among healthcare providers, hence enhancing the quality and safety of patient treatment. Because nurses are more familiar with patients on a regular basis when they are hospitalized, they understand what works and what does not work for them. By exchanging information with providers, nurses and other healthcare professionals may develop a strategy that is effective for a specific patient (Labrague et al., 2022). Collaboration refers to open communication, mutual trust, respect, and the pursuit of similar objectives among healthcare workers, particularly nurses and doctors. All of these principles of cooperation must exist in order for collaboration to be successful. Inter-professional cooperation is simple to create in healthcare when professionals trust one another, respect one another, and work cooperatively toward a similar objective (Labrague et al., 2022). Not only can it enhance the quality of treatment, but it also has the potential to lower costs, particularly those related to readmission.
Steps Necessary to Implement the Quality Improvement Initiative
The first nurse should be educated about the modifications that are required to implement communication quality improvement by unit managers and directors. A workshop or even brochures might be used to communicate with nurses. All of the required tools should be supplied to nurses to increase communication quality. Nurses should be instructed on how to utilize them and the need for synchronized communication and collaboration (Vukoja et al., 2021). Nurses should be notified of the communication requirements regularly. This can be accomplished by displaying posters outlining the nurses’, patients’, and daily preconceptions. The posters should be exhibited in both staff areas and patient rooms so that they are updated frequently.
Evaluation of Quality Improvement Initiative
Improvements in communication quality can be measured in a variety of ways. The first step is to do a periodic review to ensure that nurses have all they need to communicate successfully and to give patient and family resources. A nursing leader should be appointed to collect input from both patients and nurses. A form for recording the nurses’ clinical observations should be available. To ensure that communication remains normal, it should be monitored and appraised regularly (Dykes et al., 2017). The provision of feedback would be an excellent method of evaluation. Nurses, family members, and patients should provide input on what succeeded, what did not, what needs to be improved, and how it should be done in the future. Focus groups, questionnaires, and field observations can all provide feedback.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the use of the SBAR protocol, safety checklists, and remote simulation training improves nurses’ communications, thus minimizing rehospitalization, nonadherence to daily care procedures, and duration of hospital stay. SBAR protocol has been established to be an important factor in assessing re-admission risk and daily interdisciplinary rounds. In ICUs, the use of a daily checklist and objective setting during the multidisciplinary nurses’ rounds correlates to reduced hospital length of stay, resulting from increased nurse-patient relationships. Therefore, nurses should be trained on how to use such tools and, more importantly, the importance of coordinated communication and great teamwork within healthcare facilities.
References
Dykes, P. C., Rozenblum, R., Dalal, A., Massaro, A., Chang, F., Clements, M., Collins, S., Donze, J., Fagan, M., Gazarian, P., & Hanna, J. (2017). Prospective evaluation of a multifaceted intervention to improve outcomes in intensive care: The promoting respect and ongoing safety through patient engagement communication and technology study. Critical Care Medicine, 45(8), e806-e813. Web.
Min Sun, P. A. R. K., Su Jung, L. E. E., & Young Rim, C. H. O. I. (2021). Exploring a nursing home-specific, interdisciplinary, function-focused, communicative framework based on situation, background, assessment, and recommendation. The Journal of Nursing Research, 29(3), 1-10. Web.
Vukoja, M., Dong, Y., Adhikari, N. K., Schultz, M. J., Arabi, Y. M., Martin-Loeches, I., Hache, M., Gavrilovic, S., Kashyap, R., & Gajic, O. (2021). Checklist for early recognition and treatment of acute illness and injury: An exploratory multicenter international quality-improvement study in the icus with variable resources. Critical Care Medicine, 49(6), e598-e612. Web.
Labrague, L. J., Al Sabei, S., Al Rawajfah, O., AbuAlRub, R., & Burney, I. (2022). Interprofessional collaboration as a mediator in the relationship between nurse work environment, patient safety outcomes and job satisfaction among nurses. Journal of Nursing Management, 30(1), 268-278. Web.