Nursing Quality Indicators: Definitions and Implications

Every hospital administration is concerned about the well-being of its patients and the quality of treatment offered by their employees. In light of this, there is a nursing code that assists nurses in determining various patient needs such as pain levels, patient falls, and medical information, among many others. Nursing Quality Indicators are used by nurses to monitor a patient’s progress and aid in their recovery process in order to accomplish this. Failure to attend to the indicators could lead to serious medical consequences that could surmount to negligence or ignorance on the nurse’s level and the entire hospital in particular. Case example, the article provided has a Jewish patient being offered pork and yet most of them are allergic.

First of all, any out of the ordinary sigh exhibited by a patient is not to be casually addressed or dismissed. The nurse attending to Mr. J was ignorant and negligent when she was asked by the patient’s daughter to explain the red spot on the base of his spine. In her words, “oh that is not anything to worry about. It will go away as soon as he gets up.” This goes to show how uninformed the assistant nurse was. Application of the Nursing Quality Indicators (NQI) could have helped the assistant nurse identify that the red mark on the patient was due to wrong dietary prescription rather than a simple rush that would soon disappear. Additionally, in terms of the hospital, they could easily asses their provision of health services especially now that they gave a wrong diet to a patient (Pollard, 2010). Therefore, from the supportive argument above, the application of these quality indicators could no more be emphasized for the purposes of quality health care as well as exhibiting professionalism in the hospital in terms of the staff members.

Important to note is that these quality indicators are not without the patient’s data provided for example incidences of pressure and ulcers. Quality indicators as stated previously also act as the achievements of a hospitals progress (Winland-Brown, 2013). The hospital therefore benefits from the data because they could easily assess themselves in terms of how well they provide health care services. In the case of Mr. J, he being a Jew suffered (wrong dietary prescriptions) just like many other Jews who had previously been to that same hospital. If the management took the statistics to concern, that would have meant that there existed a pattern in a particular group of patients. This in turn could have led to their evaluation of staff members starting from the kitchen staff to the nurse attendant of the patient.

As the nursing supervisor, I would summon all the involved parties but specifically deal with the Certified Nurse Assistant. First of all, it would have gone a long way to identify the patients irritating mark that was a result of the pork meal served. Identifying such a problem would have easily been resolved by addressing the kitchen department instead of involving everyone else. Secondly, the manner in which she handled the matter displayed utmost ignorance of the code of hospital ethics using words like ”half a pork cutlet never killed anyone.” As a result of the displayed ignorance, the best option for the nurse is to refer her back to an ethical training class for purposes of better handling patients.

References

Pollard, P. B. (2010). Nursing Quality Indicators: Definitions and Implications. Washington DC: American Nurses Association.

Winland-Brown, J. E. (2013). Nursing. Florida: Adventure Works.

Lynda Juall (2017) Handbook of Nursing Diagnosis. Philadelphia. Wolters Kluwer