Introduction
It should be noted that nursing personnel is central to patient safety. In its turn, patient security is a fundamental principle of medical care. At every stage of assistance, some factors might affect directly or indirectly the patient’s health and lead to undesirable consequences in the event of negligence or medical errors (Duffy, 2013). Adverse reactions may also occur in inaccuracies related to clinical practice, products, or procedures applied to a patient or the medical approaches in general. The purpose of this paper is to review the issue of Missed Care and to outline the practices in the current work setting to ensure higher patient safety and adequacy of care.
Definition
Missed Care is a problem that is of critical importance for the healthcare industry. It is also defined as error of omission, which implies that the care needed for the patient has not been performed promptly, has been furnished partially, or was not performed at all (Duffy, 2013). Besides, the criticality of Missed Care can be explained by the cases of mortality in healthcare institutions, which is the undesirable event notwithstanding the setting or the complexity of the patient’s case. According to the latest researches, this issue has not been paid adequate attention despite its significance; therefore, additional safety research is required to ensure more quality care and the elimination of missed care situations (Duffy, 2013).
In terms of nurse-sensitive indicators, the statistics revealed that the majority of healthcare organizations still face the problem of nurse staffing and shortage, which evidences that the current workforce experiences work and responsibility overload, which inevitably leads to medical errors (Glembocki, 2013). Moreover, the two main indicator attributes to consider are structural and outcome factors. In particular, the first category includes the number of hours a nurse can dedicate to a patient, the availability of the nursing personnel, and the burnout experienced by the majority of staff due to constant pressure and overburden. Regarding the second category, the experts attribute the nurse-sensitive indicators to patient outcomes (Glembocki, 2013). That is to say, it includes the prevalence of falls, infections, care dissatisfaction, and so on. All of the above hinders the delivery of safe care and requires immediate attention to improve clinical practice.
Impact
The number of missed care cases influences the continuous quality improvement in both positive and negative ways. On the one hand, it negatively affects the perception of the nurse’s job and leads to continuous employee turnover. On the other hand, it attests to the need for healthcare institutions to improve their staffing methods and approaches (Swearingen, 2015). Moreover, it pushes the person to learn effective communication and collaboration techniques to decrease the number of undesirable patient and nursing outcomes.
Executive Brief
To improve the safety of patients, the integrated efforts across the system are required. They should include a wide range of measures to improve clinical performance including:
- infection control;
- safe use of medication;
- equipment safety;
- safe clinical practice;
- safe environment for care (Swearingen, 2015).
Also, to ensure continuous quality improvement in the institution, it is essential to review the following aspects (Swearingen, 2015):
- staffing levels;
- work environment;
- nurse personnel work hours;
- the efficiency of teamwork;
- communication and collaboration skills of the staff.
It is essential that the nursing personnel, the leadership, and all the stakeholder groups work jointly to ensure that better patient outcomes can be achieved. As Missed Care is attributed to nurse-sensitive factors, it is crucial to optimize the work of the staff so that each nurse can be held responsible for the adequate number of patients and can furnish care within the limits of expertise. Thus, it will be possible to improve the quality of care and decrease the number of omission errors.
References
Duffy, J. (2013). Quality caring in nursing and health systems. New York, NY: Springer.
Glembocki, M. (2013). Advancing professional nursing practice. Minnetonka, MN: Creative Health Care Management.
Swearingen, P. (2015). All-in-one care planning resource. New York, NY: Elsevier.