Nursing: Quality Improvement, Teamwork, and Collaboration

Nowadays, nursing has become a more and more demanding profession where standards of quality are among the toughest. These standards are regulated by such documents as the Code of Practice and Nursing Code of Ethics. These documents outline the ways to improve quality, facilitate teamwork and collaboration. This paper hypostatizes that improvement in these spheres involves providing quality services to patients, upholding the patients’ central role in healthcare, and enhancing communication between the departments.

The quality of medical care is not a private problem of individual medical and preventive institutions, it inevitably grows into a nationwide problem of the quality of life of the population. To improve the quality of nursing services, several steps should be taken by the nurses’ community. First of all, to the improve safety of nursing, steps should be taken to minimize the quantity of errors. To avoid administering the wrong medication, all medicine should be labeled (Dingley & Hayes). Secondly, a two-step patient identification procedure should be implemented. This allows the nurse to be sure that they administer the right medication to the patients who need it (Dingley & Hayes). Thirdly, the effectiveness of communication between caregivers should be enhanced so that crucial test results are available the moment they are needed. Moreover, patient education as well as establishing medical alarm systems play a significant role in enhancing safety within medical care.

Safety measures not only include correct administration of medicines and taking care of patients’ needs but seeing to it that patients do not hurt themselves or each other. This is especially relevant in psychiatric hospitals where some patients are put on a suicide watch (Schepel et al., 2019). In surgical departments, wrong-site surgery is among the most relevant problems. To avoid performing procedures in the wrong places, special marking should be used so that no mistakes occur in the process.

Medication reconciliation should be assessed before medicine is administered to a person. Nurses should find out if there are any discrepancies in the prescriptions and alert the doctor if they see that something is wrong. Often, old prescriptions do not reconcile with new ones, especially if two different doctors prescribed medication. Verification of medicines helps to enhance patient’s safety as well. Unlabeled solutions should be discarded, and others should be verified by two people before being administered.

The peculiarity of the professional environment of medical workers is that almost every area of their activity involves working in a team, for example in an operating team, or constant interaction with colleagues. Moreover, nurses constantly communicate with patients and their relatives, explaining medical procedures and reassuring patients. Ethics dictates that a nurse should always look neat, be polite to colleagues, patients and, their relatives. Sensitivity, responsiveness, kindness, care, and attention are required from medical professionals in their daily work. Caring for the seriously ill requires a nurse to have great patience, tact, and compassion. The fundamental responsibility of a nurse includes four components: to promote health; to prevent diseases; to restore health and alleviate suffering.

A nurse shows respect for life, dignity, and human rights in the person of each patient, regardless of nationality, race, faith, skin color, age, gender, political beliefs, social status. The nurse must maintain the highest level of nursing care possible in a particular situation. While performing her professional duties, a nurse should maintain a level of personal behavior that would create a good reputation for this profession.

Collaboration between nurses plays an important role in patient care. It involves working in medical teams, especially when assisting at operations or performing complex procedures as well as direct communication of the patient’s needs when nurses work in shifts. Collaboration presupposes giving advice from more experienced nurses to younger staff, sharing knowledge and open discussion of difficulties nurses may encounter in their work.

References

Dingley, C., Hayes, J. The nurses’ role in quality and safety.

Schepel, L., Aronpuro, K., Kvarnström, K., Holmström, A. R., Lehtonen, L., Lapatto-Reiniluoto, O., & Airaksinen, M. (2019). Strategies for improving medication safety in hospitals: evolution of clinical pharmacy services. Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, 15(7), 873-882.

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