The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital pays great attention to continuous quality and safety improvement, focusing on research, inpatient, and outpatient care. The observation of the official website that presents the recent data related to the hospital performance illustrates that such domains of health care quality as timeliness, efficiency, and safety are especially valued and promoted within this hospital. Speaking more precisely, one may note that the mentioned domains help to increase health care quality so that customers may feel comfortable and receive the most appropriate health care services.
In spite of the presence of positive quality improvement domains that are enumerated above, there are also certain challenges. The issue of patient-centeredness may be identified as one that presents challenge for the UAB Hospital as there is the lack of proper attitude to patients (“UAB Hospital”, n.d.). In effect, the above quality issue affects the hospital reputation, its overall operation, and also customers’ perceptions.
The patient-centered care is expected to be respectful and responsive to the needs, values, and other aspects that are important to an individual patient. In order to promote this domain, a nurse leader may initiate certain measures to re-new the concept of care, focusing on collaboration with patients or their representatives to establish enhanced quality standards and regulations. Such an approach is likely to consider core patients’ needs and perceptions as a result of an in-depth comprehension of their concerns. In other words, the contribution made after the implementation of the mentioned strategy would be based on both a leader nurse’s initiative and patients’ involvement.
At the same time, it is essential to pinpoint that patient-centeredness challenge would be addressed, and proper nurse-patient relationships would be established due to the increased trust and understanding between these actors. According to Weston and Roberts (2013), the quality of nursing knowledge and the improvement of the state of health care delivery depend on the regular exchange of information between all the participants in the process. In this regard, patients themselves would serve as a source of valuable information. At this point, before collaborating with patient on the given issue, certain quality and safety issues are to be clearly outlined to make sure that they are aware of the key standards.
The effective future nursing performance requires constant improvement strategies while inter-professional collaboration also identifies the level of appropriate patient-centered health care delivery. The collaborative approach allows “meeting personal and population needs at the community level; assisting health systems professionals to acquire the knowledge and tools to improve quality” (“Crossing the quality chasm: The IOM health care quality initiative”, n.d., para. 19).
In case of the quality improvement strategy that was mentioned earlier in this paper, the cooperation of several experts helps to come up with relevant and comprehensive solutions that, in their turn, lead to the increased satisfaction of customers’ needs and improved health care outcomes (“Crossing the quality chasm: The IOM health care quality initiative”, n.d.). Furthermore, inter-professional collaboration makes health care services more accessible and transparent as team-based performance allows addressing patient-centeredness challenges with the help of effective communication and leadership.
However, inter-professional collaboration may lack cohesion in case team members cannot come up with the same conclusions or agree on one decision that, nevertheless, may be eliminated in the course of special staff training and practical work.
References
Crossing the quality chasm: The IOM health care quality initiative. (n.d.). Web.
UAB Hospital (n.d.). Web.
Weston, M., & Roberts, D. W. (2013). The influence of quality improvement efforts on patient outcomes and nursing work: A perspective from chief nursing officers at three large health systems. Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 18(3). Web.