Quality improvement/management (QI) Initiative in Team Nursing

Quality Improvement/Management (QI) Initiative in Team Nursing

Introduction

One of the most famous aspects of nursing is widely known as Team Nursing. The improvement in this direction will bring a lot of positive changes in patient care. The concept although is relatively old however it has not been up till recently that the experts in the field of health care have started paying more attention to put it into practice. Although. there are a number of practices exercised everyday in the field of medical for ensuring useful and effective patient practices. However, the evolvement of the new practices and the development of the existing practices are other important aspects in the field. Be it the areas of education, medicine, management and practice, the room and need for constant improvement is necessary for all these disciplines. In fact, it will be fair to say that these improvements will ultimately result in improving the standards and quality of overall patient care. In addition, the fact that nurses play the most essential role in every aspect of patient care also makes it essential that the weaknesses or lacking areas in nursing are identified and perfected.

Discussion

Before analyzing the importance of Quality Improvement in team nursing practices, it is essential for the nurses and other associated individuals to be clear in understanding of both these terms. The term “Quality Assurance” can simply be defined as the process of changing the existing strategies that are not turning out to be useful, introducing new measures to ease several treatments and improving all the other aspects that contributes towards patient care of high standards. Whereas team nursing can be defined as a decentralized system, that involves taking care of the patient in such a way that the roles and responsibilities are distributed amongst the individuals in a group that are working in a collaborative and coordinated manner. The authority to lead this team of professional rests with professional nurse. The number of these individuals in a team can reach up to 4 to 6 members and the number of patients that these teams cater can reach up to 25. It is solely the duty of the team leader to plan schedules care, assign various tasks, and explain and instructs the group members the care plan with all the details.

Need for Quality Improvement Project

Over the years, there have been put forth a number of reports and studies that provided an outline of the problems and issues in the quality of the team nursing and how it affects the patient care. It has been discussed very often that one of the main reasons behind the inability to effectively utilize all the available resources is the lack of education, awareness and training for the nurses. Therefore, it is essential that all these three areas are closely observed and improved in order to make sure that nurses involved in the team are effectively meeting the demands of the patients on individual levels (Barnsteiner, ...