NUR 590 Evidence Based Practice Project Week 8 Discussion PICOT Statement

NUR 590 Evidence Based Practice Project Week 8 Discussion PICOT Statement

Population- Healthcare workers in pediatric settings

Intervention-Hand Hygiene using handwashing with soap and water and sanitizer

Comparison-Handwashing with soap and water alone

Outcome- Reduced Hospital acquired infections

Time- in Six months

Refined PICOT Question

The refined PICOT question for the EBP project is “Among healthcare workers in pediatric setting (P), does hand hygiene practices that include handwashing with soap and water alongside hand sanitizer (I) compared to handwashing with soap and water alone (C) reduce hospital acquired infections (O) within six months (T)?”

Organizational Culture and Readiness

The culture of an organization is essential in implementing changes and it impacts its overall vision, mission and values and employees’ perception in embracing new ways of executing tasks. A culture entails employees with strong norms and values, management and approaches to overall way of doing things.  A culture that involves employees, possesses strong values and norms, and encourages an open-door policy with decentralized approach is important in achieving set change objectives in an organization (Real et al., 2017). To effectively implement this EBP project proposal, pediatric healthcare settings and practitioners should use a decentralized organizational and leadership structure. The model is effective in enhancing motivation of subordinates and enhancing growth and increased diversification. Decentralization in healthcare organizations leads to better communication and adoption of innovative practices, ideas and strategies to improve quality of care. Through decentralization, the management leads a transformational approach to enhance agility and respond to new and best practices in care delivery.

The implementation of this EBP project proposal requires organizational culture that focuses on patient-centered care delivery. Through being patient-centered, an organization can support change programs to improve patient safety, quality and access while minimizing the occurrence of hospital acquired infections (HAIs). Increasing patient engagement and promoting inter-professional collaboration leads to a competitive advantage for healthcare organizations.

The evaluation of an organization’s readiness for change based on its culture is essential in implementing evidence-based practice projects. Readiness demonstrates the level to which organizational members are prepared to implement and embrace change, behaviorally and psychologically. Dearing (2018) opines that readiness is a psychological state of the mind that shows commitment to certain course of actions. As such, this EBP project proposal will leverage the Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool developed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) that assesses an organization’s readiness in promoting and enhancing the use of global health interventions. Through the tool, organizations identify substantive capacities and strengths that are present and the required one to attain their set objective. In this case, pediatric settings that aim to implement this EBP recommendations should demonstrate exemplary capacities in their attributes, have a superb and influential culture based on their missions, purposes and better values (De la Perrelle et al.., 2020). The capacity assessment tool looks at the various capabilities that include human resources, processes, financial resources, and systems as critical components of readiness for change implementation. Ready organizations possess sufficient strengths that include having the best skills, effective communication and adequate resources, availability of sufficient nurse workforce and effective engagement of their stakeholders.

The organizational readiness also evaluates the process and systems that require improvement to effectively implement the requisite changes (Vax et al., 2021). For instance, the improvement that pediatric care settings require include their patient handling process, the need for healthcare workers to adhere to hand hygiene measures and protocols, and delivery of patient-centered quality care. The organization will need quality improvement and collaborative approaches to enhance implementation. These organizations will also require quality data assessment tools for better and accurate analysis of their respective data (Dearing, 2018). The readiness will also include engagement of stakeholders and integration of information and communication technologies to ensure that all components to implement the project proposal are present. Using selected technologies, the project team and practitioners will pursue outcomes based on patient needs through enhanced alerts, reminders, and notifications on the need to comply with set hand hygiene protocols and measures that include effective handw