NR 451 Week 5: Core Competencies for Nurses

NR 451 Week 5: Core Competencies for Nurses

The QSEN has six core competencies used in nursing to include: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics.“Enhanced communication along with care coordination, patientintegration, care quality, safety, and improving access are essential components that can actively integrate patients and their caretakers into the healthcare team”(Carr,2017,p.39). As nurses we use these competencies within are practice, sometimes daily. Patient-centered care should be used daily within nursing practice. My practice setting is a nursing home, and it is all about the resident. At the nursing home we center everything on the residents including activities, meals, and even our lunch break. Team work is another aspect of competencies that is used daily.

The nurses work together to achieve task that need to be done throughout the day, and coordinating care with the certified nursing assistances. With my practice I use evidence based practice often as I am a wound care nurse. When starting this position I knew very little about wounds. This led me to seek more information on how to treat and manage wounds with evidence based practice. Quality improvement is another area that is being focused on by state. With the final rule quality improvement is a huge part of nursing home regulation, and is a topic I am looking more into at this time. It is a very complicated process. Safety should be taken in every nursing practice every second of the day. We use call lights, locks on doors, alarms, and many other interventions to assure safety for out residents. Informatics is growing in healthcare. We use electronic medical records in our facility to document medication use. We also have reports that we can pull to show graphs of different area that we may need to look at.

Carr, D. D. (2017). Motivational Interviewing Supports Patient Centered-Care and Communication. Journal OfThe New York State Nurses Association, 45(1), 39-43.

QSEN competencies. (2014). Definitions and pre-licensure KSAs. Retrieved from (http://qsen.org/competencies/pre-licensure-ksas/ (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)

Wound care involves patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence based practice, quality improvement, and safety. Hospital-acquired pressure wounds are a hot topic right now. Per the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services, “With respect to progression of pressure ulcers to Stage III or IV during the hospitalization, coding guidelines direct that the Stage III or IV pressure ulcer be confirmed as POA if a lower stage ulcer was recognized on admission and progressed to a higher stage ulcer during the admission” (Overview, 2016). With this ruling, if no pressure ulcer is documented on admission, it is assumed that the pressure ulcer is obtained during inpatient care and the facility is responsible for treatment of the wound without reimbursement. This is a financial burden for the facility because the “[c]ost of individual patient care ranges from $20,900 to $151,700 per pressure ulcer [and they] are the second most common claim after wrongful death” (Preventing Pressure Ulcers in Hospitals, 2014)