Accreditation is very important for any hospital because it helps hospitals to identify where they are not in compliance. The Joint Commission is an organization that accredits health care organizations. Nightingale Community hospital is preparing for Joint Commission inspection coming and they are also preparing for the audit. Through this audit, the hospital will determine whether they are in compliant with Joint Commission inspection. The hospital use periodic performance review to monitor the hospital throughout the year.
1a. Compliance Status
The purpose for this review is to ensure that Nightingale Community Hospital is prepared for accreditation audit. There are several standards outlined by the Joint Commission that Nightingale Community Hospital is in compliant within most areas.
There has been a great improvement when it comes to emergency management, where they have implemented a plan on how emergencies are responded to and handled. The human resource has also implemented a training program for staff.
The following are also some areas where Nightingale Community Hospital has improved on.
• Infection prevention and control
• Performance improvement
• Rights and responsibilities of the individuals
• Emergency management
• Waived testing
• Human Resource
2. Trend non compliance
Nightingale Community Hospital has been found to be non-compliant in several areas. This shows the hospital needs to implement education in order to meet joint commission standards. The hospital needs to come up with an action plan to address the non-compliant areas.
EC.02.03.03 Fire Drill
Nightingale Community hospital is not in compliant with the Joint Commission fire drill. After reviewing the documentation provided by the hospital, record...
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... nurses. According to American Nurses Association magazine, Nurse patient ratio is a model based on the number of patient per unit, in which the number of nurses per number of patients or patient days determine staffing level. Each nurse needs to be assigned two patient per shift for better service. They also need to reduce the number of hours each nurse works with maximum being 12 hours per shift and limited over time or else patient care will be at risk and this will also reduce fatigue on staff. The hospital should also hire PRN nurses who will work over a shift in case a nurse fall sick.
Nightingale Community Hospital should also consider introducing shift differential, whereby nurses who work at night will be paid more than those who work during the day. Those who work during holiday will receive double pay per hour to attract more nurses to join the hospital.
Standards are important aspects of nursing that a nurse must learn and implement every day for the rest of their nursing career. These standards provide for a nurse’s competence in the quality of care they deliver to the public. Standards offer a necessary guidance to nurses everywhere in an effort to ensure that people are treated correctly and ethically. Patients expect nurses to have a general knowledge of the medical realm and to know exactly what it is they –as nurses- are responsible for. Nurses need to have a sense of professionalism that enable the patient to feel safe and secure, knowing that a competent person is caring for him. A lack of professionalism does the opposite, making it impossible for a patient to trust or respect the nurse caring for him. Standards of nursing, if utilized correctly, give the nurse that sense of professionalism the patient is expecting. It insures for the safety of the patient and allows the nurse to provide quality health care that is expected of a medical professional.
In the case of nurse staffing, the more nurses there are the better outcome of patient safety. When there enough staff to handle the number of patients, there is a better quality of care that can be provided. The nurses would be able to focus on the patients, monitor the conditions closely, performs assessments as they should, and administer medications on time. There will be a reduction in errors, patient complications, mortality, nurse fatigue and nurse burnout (Curtan, 2016). While improving patient satisfaction and nurse job satisfaction. This allows the principle of non-maleficence, do no harm, to be carried out correctly. A study mentioned in Scientific America showed that after California passed a law in 2014 to regulate hospital staffing and set a minimum of nurse to patient ratios, there was an improvement in patient care. Including lower rates of post-surgery infection, falls and other micro emergencies in hospitals (Jacobson,
Monitoring staff levels is an important factor. Also leveling the flow of patients in and out institutions could help to reduce wide fluctuations in occupancy rates and prevent surges in patient visits that lead to overcrowding, poor handoffs, and delays in care. Studies show that overcrowding in areas such as the emergency rooms lead to adverse outcomes, because physicians and nurses having less time to focus on individual patients. One study found that for each additional patient with heart failure, pneumonia, or myocardial infarction assigned to a nurse, the odds of readmission increased between 6 percent and 9 percent (Hostetter and Klein, 2013). All of which costs the hospital money.
For my research paper, I will be taking the position that low nurse-patient ratios (the number of patients a nurse is assigned to care for during their shift) are beneficial to patient safety and should be adopted on a larger scale.
Many nurses face the issue of understaffing and having too much of a workload during one shift. When a unit is understaffed not only do the nurses get burnt out, but the patients also don’t receive the care they deserve. The nurse-patient ratio is an aspect that gets overlooked in many facilities that could lead to possible devastating errors. Nurse- patient ratio issues have been a widely studied topic and recently new changes have been made to improve the problem.
The nurse to patient ratio is unrealistic in many hospitals. In most cases it is almost impossible to give each patient the true amount of detailed care they really need. This is seen in most cases where there is one nurse assigned to 16 patients and each patient requires a different level of attention. Nurses are pressed for time, forcing them to cut corners, resulting in an increase in nosocomial infections and patient deaths. “The past decade has been a unsettled time for many US hospitals and practicing nu...
Providing the steps to ethically sound excellent care, healthcare providers must acknowledge first the legal and ethical matters involved with proper investigation and then devise a plan for best possible action recognizing the rights of the patient and its benefits followed by the application of the chosen intervention with positive outcome in mind (Wells, 2007). Delivery of excellent and quality of care at a constant level (NMC, 2008) must be marked in any responsibilities and duties of the care provider to promote exceptional nursing practice. Codes of nursing ethics and legal legislation have addressed almost all the necessary actions in making decisions in consideration to the best interest of the patient. Nurses must make sure that they are all guided by the set standard to lead their action and produce desirable and ethically sound outcomes.
Thousands of nurses throughout the nation are exhausted and overwhelmed due to their heavy workload. The administrators do not staff the units properly; therefore, they give each nurse more patients to care for to compensate for the lack of staff. There are several reasons to why
Quality care, safe practices and principles, and accountability constitute the foundation of any health care organization (Huber, 2014). Addressing patient safety issues and improving health care quality may include reorganizing operations to improve efficiency, coordinating care with interdisciplinary team members, and using information technologies (Wang, Cha, Sebek, McCullough, Parsons, Singer, & Shih, 2014). In this paper, I will review my organization’s quality program goals, objectives, and management structure, how quality improvement (QI) projects are selected, managed, and monitored, and how nursing staff are trained and supported in
The nursing profession is becoming very challenging to nurses nationwide, when the health care system is constantly changing. The nursing staffing issue is becoming an increasing global issue in hospitals and long term care facilities. Patient acuity in the hospital is growing rapidly, the patient acuity determines the level of care a patient needs, the higher the acuity, the more care is needed or required. The higher acuity results in high demand for nursing care which then resulted in increased workload, burnout and job dissatisfaction. There is an alarming concern of nurse shortage and retention in our hospitals nationwide which could seriously affect overall patient outcome.
Nurse to patient ratios are extremely paramount in assisting with overall patient mortality and wellness of our nurses. It is an issues which unfortunately affected by legislation of our government (which is affect specifically on a monetary basis). My research via Academic Search Complete allowed me to identify topics that assist my PICOT question, and enables me to further analyze and research to find out what issues directly affect is matter. Proper nurse to patient ratio, operational costs, government regulation, nurse work life and health, patient wellness, and nursing procedures and duration of those procedures are all affected by this topic and we must ensure that all are properly balanced.
In today’s health care system, “quality” and “safety” are one in the same when it comes to patient care. As Florence Nightingale described our profession long ago, it takes work and vigilance to ensure we are doing the best we can to care for our patients. (Mitchell, 2008)
Bedside nurses want to change staffing levels to assure that they have enough time to both keep up with the constantly evolving health care and to provide safe patient care. Yet, healthcare employers consider that reducing nurse patient ratio is an unnecessary expense that has not been proven to improve quality of patient care (Unruh, 2008). Employers emphasize that raising nursing staffing level is not cost-effective. In fact, in accordance with ANA’s report (2013), a study, in the Journal of Health Care Finance, confirmed that reducing patient-nurse ratios increased hospital costs, but did not lower their profitability. Higher hospital costs were attributed to wages and benefits allocated to newly hired nurses. Yet, according to Cimiotti et.al (20112), it is more costly for hospitals to not invest money on nursing.
According to The Joint Commission (2014), it was founded in 1951 and is the largest accrediting agency in the nation. It is a non-profit organization governed by a group of members consisting of physicians, nurses, administrators, and a consumer advocate and educator. They focus on public healthcare to ensure that all people receive safe, effective, high quality care. The Joint Commission plays an enormous role in healthcare by setting patient safety goals and standards that facilities must abide by (The Joint Commission, 2014).
...provide information about an organizational financial stability and challenges. A health care organization, such as JHH, can evaluate financial statements and ratio analysis to benchmark performance, address financial challenges and initiate strategies to maintain financial solvency while providing health services to patients, family members, and the community