QUALITY ASSURANCE

Applying principles of quality assurance



Applying principles of Quality Assurance

Introduction

There are four prerequisites to quality nursing care: standards that clearly articulate expectations of quality nursing care; the supervisory role of the team and clinical leaders, a way of evaluating or measuring that standards have been achieved; and sufficient staffing and appropriate skill mix. The Principles of Nursing Practice provide an overarching framework for achieving quality nursing care and clarifying nursing's contribution to improving healthcare outcomes and patient experiences. In addition to being a useful resource enabling nurses to demonstrate measure and evaluate nursing practice, the Principles assist patients in evaluating whether or not care and treatment delivered by nurses meets their expectations. Nursing has been examined from a range of different viewpoints and perspectives over the past 40 years. Studies have provided academic frameworks in which nursing as a discipline has sought to define, explain and research its purpose, its ways of working and its outcomes as well as prepare nurses to become an integral part of the multidisciplinary healthcare team. The contemporary focus for nurses, as for other members of the healthcare team, is increasingly on healthcare outcomes and their measurement, rather than the processes through which outcomes are achieved. In its definition of nursing, the makes explicit the outcomes of nursing in relation to health, specifically health maintenance, improvement, recovery, coping and achievement of the best possible quality of life for each person.

Main Idea

According to the result of the first round of external quality assessment by the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA) (Public Organization), most nursing educational institutions have differing levels of instructional quality. Administrative summary analysis of the first round external assessment report from ONESQA found that the first examination result, in order to acquire Nursing Professional License, of most nursing educational institutes were below 80 percent. Upon consideration of evaluation results in combination with process standards, it was found that most instructional standard ranged from fair to a good level of quality. The external evaluator suggested the nursing educational institutes to develop the instructional administration system; improving learner's to meet the measurement of the examination required by Nursing Council, as well monitoring process to evaluate graduate's result of practice and satisfaction of graduate's commander, in explicit form. The organization responsible for accreditation of nursing educational institutes is, for instance, ONESQA and the organization responsible for accreditation of the curriculum is, for example, Nursing Council, by whom expert team shall be appointed to evaluate the quality of education. The result of institution accreditation from Nursing Council shall be valid for 5 years maximally. Each institute shall obtain independent accreditation, demonstrating quality of curriculum and instructional administration (Lighter, 2000, 80).

The quality assurance in nursing science education is categorized into two levels; institutional level and curricular level. Nevertheless, there is still no distinctive model for the instructional quality assurance in nursing science. There is only the development of model for quality control in transforming the curriculum into the instruction for Bachelor ...