ACCOUNTABILITY OF NURSING PROFESSIONALS

Accountability of Nursing Professionals

Accountability of Nursing Professionals

Any names of patients referred to in this assignment have been changed to protect their confidentiality. The NMC states as a registered nurse you must guard against breaches of confidentiality by protecting information from improper disclosure at all times. The placement referred to in this assignment is an Elderly Mentally Infirm (EMI) home, which is located on Merseyside.

Many people talk about the accountability of health care organizations and health professionals. Does this mean something new, or are they referring to the regulation and accreditation that we already practice? What does the term acounntability mean to staff nurses? Does it change what we do in any way?

Diane L. Huber, RN, CNAA, PhD, FAAN, Associate Professor, University of Iowa College of Nursing, Iowa City, Iowa, replies: Accountability is as old as Florence Nightingale's analysis of mortality statistics in the Crimean War and as new as evidencebased practice and outcomesmanagement movements. Nurses always have been accountable to their clients for the quality and character of their service and to society for safe and competent practice via licensure laws. (Martin, 2004)

The difference is in the way we think about how nurses, physicians, other service providers, and health care organizations visibly demonstrate their accountability

It's no longer enough to follow the correct process or procedure. First, caregivers must uncover, translate, and use research knowledge as the foundation for evidencebased practice to be accountable for cost-effectiveness. For example, we used to give pain medications as ordered. Now we need to use the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research guidelines' pain scale assessment as a basis for decisions about pain reduction interventions.

Second, we need to use informatics knowledge and technology to capture, process, and retrieve real-time data. This enables us to make clinical and administrative decisions quickly enough to affect outcomes for each patient.

In the past, we manually tabulated nursing data and operated on retrospective trends. Now we must have reliable, valid, and appropriate data at hand to make decisions as we provide services. (Nilsson, 2000)

Health care is a critical, expensive, and highly personal service. To be accountable, we must harness the knowledge explosion and use customized computer tools to enhance nursing expertise. This will give nurses the resources to do the right thing at the right time to make a difference to patient outcomes. Accountability on demand means nurses must prove their worth. (Hinchliff, ...