In the context of the further spread of COVID-19, the clinical site continues to focus on quality improvement studies oriented toward examining, among other issues, how the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) can improve patient care. Currently, it is studied what is the percentage of medical staff representatives who can use PPE ineffectively and what is the correlation between this percentage and the percentage of other medical workers and patients who can be infected in clinical settings. These percentages are used as benchmarks, and the primary focus of this study is to guarantee that all nurses and physicians effectively apply PPE to provide safe services with minimal risks of being infected. After the study is completed, new specific guidelines will be provided to staff regarding the efficient use of gloves, gowns, masks, and other types of PPE (Gurses et al., 2019). Furthermore, in the context of this study, high-quality protective devices will be selected.
Nurses play a key role in this and similar quality improvement studies because they will directly apply study results. The successful implementation of quality improvement projects depends on focusing on nurses’ opinions regarding effective processes during the study development. Nurses’ opinions and participation allow for determining the areas for improvement, changes to be realized in processes and procedures, as well as strengths and weaknesses of proposed and implemented alterations from the perspective of efficient practice (Huston, 2019). If nurses are not involved in such quality improvement projects, there are risks that they will experience certain problems when implementing changed techniques and methods in their daily practice. From this viewpoint, nurses play a key role in participating in such types of studies for the purpose of improving the quality of services and care for patients.
References
Gurses, A. P., Dietz, A. S., Nowakowski, E., Andonian, J., Schiffhauer, M., Billman, C., Abashian, A. M., Trexler, P., Osei, P., Benishek, L. E., & Xie, A. (2019). Human factors–based risk analysis to improve the safety of doffing enhanced personal protective equipment. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 40(2), 178-186. Web.
Huston, C. J. (2019). Professional issues in nursing: Challenges and opportunities (5th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.