Improving the Quality of Nursing Care

1985 Words4 Pages

The field of nursing has evolved over time and keeps changing every day. With the numerous changes comes improvement in the quality of care that nurses give on a daily basis. For example, nurses never used to wear gloves when performing a majority of their tasks such as administering injections or toileting patients. Over time, it was discovered that many patients carried diseases that were easily transferrable via body fluids or blood. As a result of the discovery, nurses began wearing gloves when performing a majority of their nursing care. This not only helped to protect the nurses from contracting numerous diseases, but the patients as well. The nurses were not transferring germs and bacteria from patient to patients because they were wearing gloves with every patient and discarding each of them when done. This is only one example of how the quality of nursing has changed over time. There are many more with a majority of the changes involving the administration of medications.

Improving the accuracy and efficiency of medication passing is a major contributor to improving the overall quality of nursing. Medications are key in improving a patient’s health and level of comfort. It’s the nurse’s priority to make sure the patient is safe when taking the majority of medications that many of them take. Nurses must take vitals, reassess, and evaluate the effectiveness of all medications administered. Medications function to maintain a person’s blood pressure, pulse, fluid balance, thyroid function, and many other things. There are also many different types of pain medications that are important when trying to improve the patient’s health because it is more likely their health will improve if they’re free of pain and comfortable. ...

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...), 243-248. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?Db=pubmed&Cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=24308090&dopt=abstractplus

Tzeng, H., Yin, C., & Schneider, T. E. (2013). Medication error-related issues in nursing practice. MEDSURG Nursing, 22(1), 13-50. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.ivcc.edu:2240/sp3.11.0a/ovidweb.cgi?&S=BGPPFPKNHIDDLPGANCMKDBMCBPDPAA00&Complete+Reference=S.sh.51%7c1%7c1

Wu, M., Lee, T., Tsai, T., Lin, K., Huang, C., Mills, M. (2013). Evaluation of a mobile shift report system on nursing documentation quality. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 31(2), 85-93. doi:10.1097/NXN.0b013e318266cac3

Yun, L., Clifford, P., Bjorneby, A., Thompson, B., Vannorman, S., Won, K., & Larsen, K. (2013). Quality improvement through implementation of discharge order reconciliation. American Journal Of Health-System Pharmacy, 70(9), 815-820. doi:10.2146/ajhp120050

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