The Role of Nursing in Promoting Patient Safety: Best Practices and Strategies

The role of nursing in patient safety includes promoting policies, practices and standards that foster safe work environments. This is especially critical when addressing nurse and nurs fpx 4060 assessment 1 practicing in the community interactions.

Physicians are susceptible to human error, and nurses can serve as extra eyes to call a timeout before a mistake is made. Additionally, hospitals should incorporate transparency and a culture of trust to promote safety in the workplace.

In the high-stress, high-risk world of nursing, a favorable work environment is a key to minimizing errors. Nurses must be encouraged to call out other staff members for sloppy work and must feel comfortable admitting their own mistakes without fear of repercussions. Administrators who shame their employees for making honest mistakes stifle communication and cause nurses to sweep problems under the rug, directly jeopardizing patient safety.

As the primary front-line healthcare professionals, nurses must advocate for adequate nurse staffing levels. The PSNet Classic 2010 study noted a direct correlation between the nurse-to-patient ratio and mortality risk, but determining adequate staffing is an intricate process that involves many variables on a unit-by-unit basis. Middle management is essential to the process because they must have a shared understanding of the desired operating point where the boundaries of financial performance, workload and safe care delivery meet. This requires effective leadership that understands the concepts of human factors and system improvement science (Cook & Rasmussen, 2005). The role of nurses in promoting patient safety also includes reporting unsafe practices to the NR 393 Week 4 Course Project Milestone  authority.

A primary role of nursing is to ensure that all team members are communicating and working together. Patient care rounds are one way that nurses contribute to a team effort by ensuring that efforts are coordinated, information is disseminated, and potential errors are avoided.

During these rounds, physicians and other team members share a common understanding of the patient’s health status, medical needs, and progress toward discharge. They also have the opportunity to discuss any notable occurrences that occurred during shift changes and to address any issues raised by NR 439 Week 6 Assignment Reading Research Literature .

While safety huddles have been shown to improve communication and collaboration, they are often difficult to sustain because of the time and effort needed for a multidisciplinary meeting. This is why many hospitals have adopted patient care rounds, which involve all disciplines and allow for the participation of LPNs to emphasize front-line perspectives and the importance of their contributions. They also offer the advantage of addressing systematic problems that might not be easily identified by monitoring a unit’s checklists, such as equipment malfunction or failure to complete vital signs checks.

One of the most important aspects of nursing is maintaining a standard of professionalism. This includes being on time for work, providing accurate and complete patient care and following strict infection-control policies.

Among the other key nursing best practices are establishing trust and adhering to medical standards. Patients who are comfortable with their nurses feel more at ease during treatments and may recover faster. It is important to be honest with patients and communicate all changes in nrs 451 vn topic 2 benchmark effective approaches in leadership condition as soon as possible.

Another aspect of this is ensuring that nurses follow evidence-based practice (EBP). EBP involves using research to guide clinical decisions, which can help prevent errors such as wrong-site or wrong-person surgeries or administering the wrong medication.

The use of bar code medication administration (BCMA) is a simple yet effective way to reduce potential errors when administering medications. It requires nurses to scan a patient’s barcode on their wristband and the medication’s bar code with a bedside portable scanner that is linked to the electronic Medication Administration Record (MAR) prior to giving the medication. This process also checks that the medication matches the order, does not contain any high-alert medications and is within its expiration date.

Our implementation of BCMA included data transparency, weekly dashboards and nursing education. Nursing cabinet leaders and the chief nursing officer were copied on weekly emails to encourage transparency, and BCMA scanning and pain reassessment compliance became a standing agenda item at monthly nurse cabinet meetings over a 17-month period. Statistical process control was implemented to identify non-compliant users, and their ADC usernames were displayed with each week’s percentage of unscanned doses (p0.001). This resulted in a decrease in non-compliance and a high NR 351 Week 6 Professional Paper scan rate that was sustained over the study period.