If there’s any foundation to the entire healthcare system, it must be the nurses. They stop at no ends, tirelessly and passionately providing top-notch care to patients worldwide while making the lives of doctors and other healthcare professionals easier.
Their efforts are priceless – they influence the quality of medical care and have an essential bearing on patients’ health. But despite their critical role, there’s an ever-growing need for constant improvement in healthcare quality.
This is because healthcare is a constantly evolving field. As science and technology advance, so do patient expectations. And with that, nurses need to continue to grow their skills, their knowledge and learn to adapt to the times.
With that in mind, we’ll discuss some of the best ways nurses can improve healthcare quality.
The List of Ways Nurses Can Improve Quality of Healthcare
- Work Towards Professional Development
- Be Empathetic and Compassionate
- Deliver Personalized Patient Care
- Educate Your Patients
- Promoting Patient Safety
- Infection Control
Work Towards Professional Development
Every career requires continuous professional development, whether attending seminars, taking up new courses, or participating in research. When it comes to improving healthcare quality, the professional development of healthcare providers could mean life or death. And if you’re passionate about healthcare but aren’t qualified as a nurse, there’s still time.
The first thing you’d need to do in this case would be to get a nursing degree. You can always look up options for second degree ABSN online programs if you want to fast-track into nursing as a career.
Once you’re a (registered) nurse, it doesn’t stop there – you can still pursue advanced nursing degrees or take up additional courses. The goal is to keep learning new things to advance and apply the latest skills to your patients.
Be Empathetic and Compassionate
It’s not a secret that you can’t deliver high-quality healthcare if you’re not compassionate or show empathy to those you’re caring for. In their unique position, there are many ways for nurses to deliver empathy-infused care.
It starts by actively listening to patients’ concerns and acknowledging their feelings. When patients feel their problems are being heard instead of dismissed, they feel validated, releasing their anxiety about their healthcare.
This creates a supportive environment and increases trust between patients and healthcare providers.
This would all result in patient satisfaction with their healthcare team, leading to better cooperation among the healthcare providers, resulting in better efficiency and, ultimately, high-quality care.
Deliver Personalized Patient Care
If you’ve ever been on a busy hospital floor, you’ve probably heard nurses or doctors refer to their patients as a number or, even worse – their disease. “Kidney stone in room 4 needs more painkillers” doesn’t bode too well, does it?
This kind of practice removes that human touch from healthcare it desperately needs.
By providing personalized patient care, for example, using the patient’s name while talking about them, you humanize and connect with them. This would help you in providing better care to your patients.
Connecting individually with your patients can deepen your understanding of their problems, allowing you to find better ways to solve them. After all, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to treatment.
Let’s say you find out through talking that your patient is going through marriage problems, which are causing mental distress and worsening their medical condition. You can work together to combat the problem and figure out how to overcome this hurdle.
Educate Your Patients
Patient education is one of the most powerful tools that enhances healthcare quality. If your patients don’t understand things about their health or treatment, they won’t be able to take care of themselves.
Or worse yet, they’ll go for a quick internet search and seek answers from unreliable sources, which can cause a mountain of problems on its own.
But the benefits of patient education are much greater than you think. If you convey important information about your patient’s health to your patient and their support system, many potential problems can be avoided.
Because patient participation is vital for overall health management, figuring out ways to inform and involve people in their care is necessary to avert chronic illnesses in the first place.
Not to mention that by making informed decisions about their health and understanding how to deal with their conditions alone, your patients can avoid unnecessary, avoidable, and costly hospital trips.
This would also ensure hospital staff and resources are available to those who need them.
Promoting Patient Safety
The Institute of Medicine defines patient safety as “preventing harm to patients.” It also involves promoting patient safety by developing a healthcare delivery system focused on minimizing errors and learning from the ones that happen.
Since nurses have the closest interaction with patients of any healthcare professional, monitoring their illnesses, administering medication, and communicating self-care and discharge details – they’re at the forefront of their safety.
One way to do this is to monitor each patient carefully. A patient’s medical state might shift in the blink of an eye, so you must be ready to spot any problems.
Regular training improves nurses’ patient monitoring abilities, allowing them to better understand the specifics of wound development, pressure ulcers, and other bedside conditions and detect issues before they become potentially hazardous.
Infection Control
With more emphasis placed on infection control in hospitals and other healthcare settings, nurses can greatly improve the quality of healthcare as a whole.
One of the most common problems with patients in hospitals is hospital-acquired infections. These are infections the patient didn’t have coming in but caught during their stay.
The good news is that these can be avoided. If you follow strict hospital guidelines for infection prevention, such as regular handwashing, use of hand sanitizers, and disinfection of any surfaces in the hospital setting, it can make a big difference.
Moreover, you can educate patients, colleagues, and others who enter the hospital frequently about these measures and provide a safer, infection-free environment for patient care.
Conclusion
In the end, the importance of nurses in improving healthcare quality is impossible to overstate. As frontline caregivers, nurses have a major effect on patients’ health and experiences, and the quality of health services directly affects the well-being and lives of those needing care.
Being at the center of healthcare, nurses have a special opportunity to create positive change. As a nurse, your commitment, skills, and compassionate approach have the potential to transform healthcare experiences, resulting in better results and satisfied patients.
You must ensure healthcare quality stays on top of your mind by staying up-to-date, constantly improving your skills, and pushing for patient safety.