The nurse’s role in coordinating care to enhance quality and reduce cost

The nurse’s role in coordinating care to enhance quality and reduce cost

Nurses are directly involved in all areas of hospital quality improvement, including providing patient care, bedside care, data collection, surgery assistance, medication management, and other functions. Medication errors can pose a significant financial burden to the hospital and the patients. Nurses coordinates care by assessing the work environment, implementing medication safety technologies, educating patients as well as caregivers, and taking extra precaution with high alert medications, among other approaches to help reduce the financial burdens both to the patients and health organization due to medication errors (Amiri, Khademian & Nikandish, 2018).

Nurses coordinate care in many ways, including sharing knowledge related to patient care with other care team members. They also work to ensure the seamless transition of care and collaborate with interdisciplinary teams to develop a personalized and proactive care plan in managing patients’ healthcare needs. Nurses can coordinate care by sharing the health problem or advocating against unnecessary treatment or medications. This coordination can be achieved by documenting and sharing the health issue and patient progress with other healthcare team members to help in clinical decision-making (Westbrook et al., 2018). This will help in achieving cost efficiency. Proper coordination and collaborative teamwork would help share knowledge and problem-solving, reducing the costs that would have occurred during medication administration.

Stakeholders with who nurses would need to coordinate to drive quality and safety enhancements with medication administration include society in general, administrators, patients, and their families, researchers, technicians, nursing educators, and physicians, among other stakeholders to help achieve quality and safety enhancement in healthcare systems (Sherwood & Barnsteiner, 2021). Patients and their families play a critical role in ensuring quality patient safety through efficient medication administration by providing essential information or seeking clarification on medicines.

Conclusion

Patient safety is essential when providing health care services to patients and remains the top priority for the interdisciplinary team. The most common causes of medication errors during administration are poor communication between healthcare professionals, medical abbreviation, fatigue from nurses due to understaffing, illiteracy from patients or caregivers at home, lack of adequate pharmacologic knowledge, distractions, increased workloads, and drug miscalculation, among other reasons. It is very important to strictly adhere to the five rights of medication administration which help prevent this health care issue because they provide clear guidance on how to administer medicine.

References

Alotaibi, Y. K., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi Medical Journal, 38(12), 1173.

Amiri, M., Khademian, Z., & Nikandish, R. (2018). The effect of nurse empowerment educational program on patient safety culture: a randomized controlled trial. BMC medical education, 18(1), 1-8.

Coles, E., Wells, M., Maxwell, M., Harris, F. M., Anderson, J., Gray, N. M., Milner, G., & MacGillivray, S. (2017)

Robertson, J. J., & Long, B. (2018). Suffering in silence: medical error and its impact on health care providers. The Journal of emergency medicine, 54(4), 402-409.

Sherwood, G., & Barnsteiner, J. (Eds.). (2021). Quality and safety in nursing: A competency approach to improving outcomes. John Wiley & Sons.

Westbrook, J. I., Raban, M. Z., Walter, S. R., & Douglas, H. (2018). Task errors by emergency physicians are associated with interruptions, multitasking, fatigue, and working memory capacity: a prospective, direct observation study. BMJ quality & safety, 27(8), 655-663.