Nurse/Patient Empowerment

Indeed, the best strategy towards enhancing quality of care is to engage nursing practitioners to empower and support patients as well as patient’s rights that allow for accumulation of knowledge concerning their health and healthcare requirements. According to, a highly favorable strategy is the personalized patient activation and empowerment model (P-PAE). As a culturally informed framework, the P-PAE works on multiple platforms which not only critically involve the nurse as a professional care giver but also the patient, the community, and by extension, the healthcare delivery system. It works through a cyclic process where the patient not only accumulates vital information and knowledge but also gains competencies like confidently determining direction on personal health outcomes (Chan et al., 2016). The only risk associated with this model is that it is highly dependent on the successful actualization of patient provider partnerships as per the Affordable Care Act (Chan et al., 2016). It presents far reaching benefits like engaging patients to actively participate in their own healthcare, enhancing their capacities to manage own health, and empowering them to voice concerns as well as preferences along the continuum of care.

The National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) enables hospitals at the local, regional, and federal levels to assess performance as well as job satisfaction quotas amongst individual nursing units (Staggs et al., 2015). The NDNQI allows for these individual units to compare own performance with similar nursing units in different parts of the country (Staggs et al., 2015). They support nurse empowerment since each indicator used in nursing sensitive. This implies the indicators allow nursing care professionals and administrators to understand how well nursing care outcomes are observed. For instance, through the dashboard, it is possible to determine whether a particular unit exceeded, met, or did not meet goals for each indicator. A good example is such as those concerned with bedside care like number of falls, patient perceptions of care, and productivity as well as controllable cost per unit service.

In 2017, our institution, BHY registered the fourth last placement according to the NDNQI scoreboard amongst hospitals in its bracket. The leadership at the institution determined that nursing teams were to blame for the adverse indicator levels. It embarked on a program that involved each nurse being assigned to specific patients and having to officially handover to the next nurse upon end of shift. The outcome was greater levels of collaborations amongst nursing care professionals. For instance, I was able to pinpoint that undertaking fall risk assessment at various stages from admission to discharge minimized the number of falls considerable and increased vigilance amongst other nursing staff in this regard.

References

Chen, J., Mullins, C. D., Novak, P., & Thomas, S. B. (2016). Personalized strategies to activate and empower patients in health care and reduce health disparities. Health Education & Behavior, 43(1), 25-34.

Staggs, V. S., Davidson, J., Dunton, N., & Crosser, B. (2015). Challenges in defining and categorizing falls on diverse unit types: lessons from expansion of the NDNQI Falls Indicator. Journal of nursing care quality, 30(2), 106.