NURS 351: All Nursing Adults II Clinical: Introduction

• Quality Improvement - from Johns Hopkins Medicine

• QI Guide on Improved Nursing Care - from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

• Nursing Quality - from American Nurses Association (ANA)

• Leading sustainable quality improvement - 
  DOI: 10.1097/01.NUMA.0000724940.43792.86

• Finding value in nursing care: a framework for quality improvement and clinical evaluation - an article from Nursing Economics

This guide is created for students in NURS 351 All Nursing Adults II Clinical  course. If you have any questions about the content, please feel free to contact me. I am an embedded librarian in your course. You can also post questions in the discussion thread.

NURS 351: Quality Improvement Project

Quality Improvement definition (QSEN): Use data to monitor the outcomes of care processes and use improvement methods to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality and safety of health care systems.

Objectives (these objectives were revised from information presented by QSEN: Quality and Safety Education for Nurses):

1. Seek information about outcomes of care for an acute care population
2. Use tools to make processes of care explicit
3. Identify gaps between care on the unit and best practices
4. Appreciate that continuous quality improvement is an essential part of the daily work of all health professionals.
5. Appreciate how unwanted variation affects care
6. Value measurement and its role in good patient care
7. Appreciate the value of what individuals and teams can do to improve care.

Students will work with the staff/clinical manager on their clinical unit to identify a current quality improvement topic. Once the topic is identified the clinical group will be formulate a clinical question in the PICOT format and perform a brief literature search/review.  Other activities include:

1. Reading and discussing the articles on EBP posted on the MyCLasses site.
2. Identifying current EBP guidelines that could be applied to the topic and discussing this literature in post conference (one article per student).
3. Collecting data on the unit-work with the staff to collect data that is already being obtained
4. Summarizing the data and identifying conclusions
5. Presenting the findings from the data and the literature to the staff in a poster or other presentation

All members of the clinical group will receive the same grade on this project based on involvement, depth of understanding, and final presentation.

Copyright: SU Nursing Course professors