See if you can guess which year this quote is from:

"…hospitals are increasing in size, care is becoming more technical. Yet there is growing understanding that recovery could be better in the patient’s own home, a policy that is also cost effective in an era of soaring health care costs." (1)

If you guessed the midpoint of last century you are right. Yet that observation could easily be applied to the health care situation today. ‘Old’ ideas have merit and value and it would be instructive to take a look at nursing history in the US to see where we are going tomorrow. Article continued →

Treatment of diseases has been the focus of the evaluation of the quality of health care in the past. Today there is a growing awareness of the importance of nurse care which has in turn led to the development of the measurement of nurse care. It understood that the contribution of nurse work to health care needs to be specified and quantified to improve both quality of healthcare and workplace.

In 2004 the National Quality Forum (NQF), a non profit organization of various health care stakeholders, produced a set of national standardized performance measures to establish the relationship between nursing and health care quality.

Why measure nursing care? Here are some reasons why: Article continued →

To what extent when errors occur do nurses blame themselves and not the systems they work with?

Over a decade ago a patient was administered fatal dose of chemotherapy. The State Department of Patient Health (Massachusetts) and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations found the attending nurses were not at fault, as they had done all verification and followed directions. Those organizations found the following system errors:

The investigative protocol document, the only source of information for confirming the dosage, was flawed The doctor had based his order on that document. Also there was no computer pharmacy check system. Still the state board of nursing sanctioned 16 nurses.

Article continued →

This is the start of a new series on nursing. We'll have a bit more conversation in this article to set up the future ones. Sources of this dialogue are at the bottom.

In 2004 the report Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses cited this example:

I was a ‘new nurse’. I’d been practicing only a few months when I was assigned an elderly patient who was scheduled for abdominal surgery that morning and needed a urinary catheter. I knew about, but hadn’t performed this procedure before, and neither had the other nurses on the floor- we were new graduates. I asked my head nurse if she would supervise me while I placed the catheter, but she was late for a meeting and assured me that it wasn’t difficult and I would be fine.

I went to get the supplies but there were no prepackaged catheterization trays on the floor. I ran to the floors above and below, they were out too. As I passed the nursing station, the clerk told me that OR wanted to know where the patient was. I began to round up the supplies one by one. Article continued →

Nurses Make Care Happen-Part 2

The reform of the US health system has not been without controversy. But in forced change there lies great opportunity. In seeking to avert the collision course of an aging chronically ill population with a financial inability to maintain the current system, policy makers have had to reflect and discover a hitherto unrealized fact, that nurses are the backbone of the health care system, both by virtue of their numbers and diversified involvement in caring for patients. With informatics being mandated into the health care system the nursing profession is in an ideal position to create a synergy between their work and technology. Article continued →

In the continuing search for increasing the quality of patient care, stakeholders, especially government, have focused on technology as one way of achieving that goal. What has this journey looked like and how are nurses involved?

Nurses are the health care professionals that will spend the most time caring for patients, therefore technology will impact their work the most. Article continued →