Capella Assessment 6 Driving Change Essay

Capella Assessment 6 Driving Change Essay

Capella Assessment 6 Driving Change Essay

Driving Change

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)

This proposal aims to discuss the use of evidence-based practice to foster patient safety and promote delivery of quality health care. Evidence based practice involves integrating best research evidence with client/patient values and clinical expertise, which when used by health care practitioners will eventually lead to improved patient outcome. Health practitioners are able to use enhanced patient interventions and policies to enhance the quality and efficiency of their services. This is expected to drive the much-needed health care reforms. Patience safety is viewed by many as directly correlated to quality health care. There cannot be quality health care without patients’ safety, and neither can there be quality patients’ care without quality health care delivery. Quality is an abstract term that can be brought to reality through collaboration of various stakeholders who agree and decide on standards of quality care.

The Problem and Its Impact on Quality Healthcare and Patients’ Care

Human is to errors, the adage goes. No one can separate errors with humanity. In fact, errors are as old as humanity. They occur in our homes, on the roads, and in the workplace, they just occur everywhere provided there is a human being. Both patients and clinicians have also affected mistakes in the course of their work (Clarke, 2013). Nurses are also affected by the impacts of adverse occurrences in their lives, which act to trample with their decision-making process. Society has been left over the years to persevere the effects of healthcare errors particularly on the part of nurses. These errors when they happen can negatively impact on the health of the patients either directly or indirectly.

Sometimes these errors have resulted in the loss of human life. That’s how tragic healthcare errors can be. The overall effect of healthcare errors is to deny quality health care and patient care, more so when they are made outside the acceptable standards. Nurses and other physicians are bound by a code of conduct and ethics that are supposed to guide their decisions and actions.  Once they usurp this code of conduct and that action leads to an error in health and patient care delivery, the relevant nurses must be held accountable for his or actions.

 Many patients continue to suffer negatively as a result of near errors, adverse events, and a poor level of healthcare quality that in the first should not be accorded to any patient. Given the essential role of quality healthcare and patients’ care to our lives, the purpose of this proposal is to drive forward safety and quality to the fore by applying incidence based practice in nursing practice, thereby occasioning the necessary reforms in health care. The current state of healthcare founded on errors cannot be tolerated any further.

Evidence-based Interventions for the Problem

 Evidence based practice will be used in this paper as the much-needed driver to healthcare and safety reforms. Evidence based practice in the nursing field is viewed as a crucial tool not only to drive changes and practices but also seal the knowledge gaps prevalent in our health care system (Clarke, 2013). Patients’ safety and quality in our hospitals go to the heart of our healthcare system. This is significantly dependent on nurses and nursing practice. There can be no development without an adequate health care and patient care structure. For us to improve healthcare delivery within our country, nurses must take a more proactive role in banking on evidence and research to healthcare delivery that is error free. Of importance is the fact that nurses must be involved in the entire research process. They must also collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team in all healthcare environments. Nurses and other healthcare providers, working together, it’s critical that they undertake an eternal pursuit of applying research, data, and information to guide medical practice.

Combined with the knowledge derived from experimentation, evidence, and assessment, healthcare providers particularly nurses are challenged to enhance patient care delivery process consistently (Zaccagnini & White, 2015). Collaboration in health care can assist in ensuring that patients are given the best possible healthcare no matter where they live, their gender, race or social factors.

The nursing career has a tremendous history of using research to inform decision making. Clinical expertise and current nursing evidence should be blended to improve patients care. The modern evidence based strategies towards patients care also focuses on the implementation method of the chosen strategy. Knowledge based practice includes knowledge creation, distillation, dissemination, and implementation.

Barriers to Research Use in Improving Quality Healthcare and Patients’ Care

Evidence based practice, which is a relatively new model towards improving the quality and safety of healthcare offered to patients has encountered serious challenges towards its adoption as a reform tool (Williams, Perillo & Brown, 2015). These barriers to the use of research in the practice of nursing may come from many stakeholders.  Potential barriers to implementing the application of EBP include resistance to change, inability to identify knowledge gaps, poor communication, organizational culture, and failure to generate relevant research evidence. For these obstacles to be addressed, one has to understand the objectives of applying EBP and plan in advance on how to address any resistance.

 Traditionally, the primary impediments to the application of research into the making of nursing decisions have been associated with the support availed by the enterprise in which clinicians work, the nurse’s research values, the research quality and how the study is disseminated (MacCallam & Higgins, 2014). Additional barriers to the use of evidence practice in nursing are inadequate time, lack of knowledge of statistics, lack of jurisdiction to transform patient care and insufficient of time to read the research.

How to Overcome EBP Implementation Barriers

There are many strategies to overcome the barriers that are associated with the use of evidence approach to the practice of medicine. These facilitators enable us to realize the much-needed healthcare reforms, courtesy of proof based approach clinical practice. These strategies include enhancing the managerial and collaborative support, creating time for reviewing and enforcing research findings, training support, increasing the availability of applicable research and supportive policies.

Planning, Implementing and Assessing Evidence-Based Interventions

Evidence based interventions’ implementation plans are essential for guaranteeing that nurses and other stakeholders are more strategic in their process of decision-making. The end goal is to avail positive health out come to the patients.

The question of needs and scarcity of resources must be canvased. In step 1, the problem to be addressed must be focused on. In this case, the problem to be solved is how to reduce human errors in clinical practice to boost the patients’ safety and quality healthcare. In step 2, the goals, the targeted population, and anticipated outcomes must be identified. For our case, the goal is to guarantee a quality and safe healthcare for all, free from human clinical errors. The target population, in this case, is the patients. Additionally, in step 3, the best practices must comply with organizational culture. Evidence based approach to healthcare, in this scenario, has been proposed or adopted as a reform tool. In the last and final step is the implementation of the plan. The evidence-based approach to health care should be implemented immediately in our health institutions and policies. Resources needed to implement the EBP include capita, labour, , and managerial support.  However, the program should be applied progressively to create room for continuous improvement and assessment.

Other Healthcare Professionals who are Necessary for the Reform Agenda

Although nurses occupy the biggest role in the provision of Medicare, they are not the only healthcare providers (Billings & Halstead, 2015). Other healthcare personnel to be integrated include doctors, clinicians, laboratory technologists and others. In addition, WHO and OSHA agencies will provide international guidelines on how to curb medical errors. For our health system to work efficiently there must be an effective collaboration from all these stakeholders. These entire professional must uphold ethics in the workplace if any meaningful change can be realized in the provision of health services.

Conclusion

The provision of quality and safe healthcare, free from unnecessary errors should guide policy directives in this sector. The evidence based practice offers us a fall back to reform our healthcare delivery program. Nurses should participate in the relevant research studies including in their implementation, with the view to improve the quality of services that they offer to their patients.