Skip to main content

Engage Nurses to Raise Your Patient Safety Scores

 |  By rhendren@healthleadersmedia.com  
   October 25, 2011

Who owns the quality measure and patient outcome scores in your hospital? Most hospitals have quality, safety, and infection prevention professionals devoted solely to these statistics and ways to improve them. 

All their efforts are meaningless unless nurses and other clinical staff are engaged in the process. Too often, they are not. Most staff nurses don't know what value-based purchasing is or why they should care about it. All they know is that when Administration or "Quality" has a new scheme it will take nurses more time to do their jobs.

Nurses may fully support the changes because they will benefit patients, but they don't own them and they don't own those scores.

As the people who actually touch patients, all members of the nursing staff need to feel directly responsible for patient safety. Quality improvement becomes one more meaningless directive from "above" unless nurses feel engaged in the process, involved in the plans, and accountable for the results.

"Culture eats strategy for lunch," says Mary J. Voutt-Goos, MSN, RN, CCRN, director, Patient Safety Initiatives and Clinical Care Design at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. "If frontline staff aren't in agreement and actively engaged in the process, it won't happen. Top-down approaches to culture change are typically unsuccessful."

This is one reason why scores can start creeping downward after a successful quality improvement effort has come and gone. If nurses aren't engaged in the process, they have less inclination to remain on a directed path.

"All frontline staff, not just nurses, should be engaged, as well as empowered to act, if we really want to see a change in our culture of safety," says Voutt-Goos.

One way to build a feeling of accountability in nurses is to empower them to solve the problems themselves—in conjunction with quality and patient safety professionals, of course. New procedures or processes are more likely to be met with acceptance and to become part of everyday practice when the caregivers themselves are involved in the design.

At Henry Ford Health System, the organization reviewed a synthesis of safety culture and safety climate research conducted by the Aviation Institute that identified global indicators of safety culture.

"We use these global indicators as a guiding framework for our culture of safety efforts," said  Voutt-Goos. "One of the global indicators is employee empowerment."

Empowering employees involves giving them a level of responsibility and knowledge, which sometimes they may not want, but is vital to achieving an end result of quality patient care in a financially healthy organization.

One common practice to reduce outcomes-related to issues such as patient falls or CAUTIs is to pit units against each other in competition and reward the winner with a pizza or ice cream. While it's appropriate to celebrate success and recognize hard work, I think it's a mistake to rely too heavily on competition.

Rewarding the unit that most improves its customer satisfaction scores or reduces patient falls by the greatest percentage is great at building enthusiasm and recognizing hard work, but it's not an effective long-term strategy. Nurses should be treated like adults and involved in the imperatives behind process improvement, both those related to patient care and those related to the organization's bottom line.

Just as the hospital should treat nurses as adults, nursing staff should be more interested in quality outcomes. They must seek out and embrace their level of ownership in these metrics. In today's financial reality, it is no longer acceptable to not take an active role in quality improvement efforts. Organizations should engage nurses in frank and honest communication.

The financial imperative is such that hospitals can't afford for nurses to not be wholly engaged. Back in June, Lillee Gelinas, MSN, RN, FAAN, vice president and chief nursing officer at VHA Inc., explained how "value-based purchasing is a game changer." She said hospitals can't afford to focus only on incremental improvements. They must focus on wholesale transformation, which requires a shift in nurses' thinking.

That means an end to thinking "patient safety" and "quality" belong  to a department and a realization that it belongs to nurses and to every person employed in the organization.

Rebecca Hendren is a senior managing editor at HCPro, Inc. in Danvers, MA. She edits www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com and manages The Leaders' Lounge blog for nurse managers. Email her at rhendren@hcpro.com.

Tagged Under:


Get the latest on healthcare leadership in your inbox.