If the U.S. Lacks Doctors, Can Nurses, Optometrists and Pharmacists Take Their Place?

Health Leaders Media, Cheryl Clark, 04/26/2010

The Association of American Medical Colleges' predicts that the nation's physician shortage will grow from 25,000 today to 150,000 in 15 years. Who will treat the millions more people who will have health coverage for the first time under health reform? Some of this care is almost certain to come from non-physician providers expanding their education and scope of practice.

Click here to read the story.

We've Said it Before... Nurse Interruptions Can Lead to Medication Errors

Interviewed about a new study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, INQRI researcher Linda Flynn is quoted as saying, "Patients and family members don't understand that it's dangerous to patient safety to interrupt nurses while they're working.  I have seen my own family members go out and interrupt the nurse when she's standing at a medication cart to ask for an extra towel or something [else] inappropriate."

The study found that nurses who are interrupted have an increased risk of making a medication error.  The research team observed nurses in two teaching hospitals in Sydney, Australia from September 2006 through March 2008.  The study included 98 nurses prepping and administering 4,271 medications to 720 patients.  Less than 20% of these interactions was completely error free.

You can download a copy of the study, "Association of Interruptions With an Increased Risk and Severity of Medication Administration Errors"  via the journal website.

 

More posts on this topic:

• How Do Distractions Impact Nurses?
• Reducing Distractions = Reducing Medication Errors
• Ten Years Later: Look to Nurses as Champions of Patient Safety

Discovery Channel Documentary on Medical Errors

If you missed the new Discovery Channel documentary, "Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm," you can catch it when it airs again on Saturday, May 1, or you can watch it here. In the film, Dennis Quaid, whose newborn twins were accidentally given an overdose of Heparin, presents the stories of patients who have died due to medical errors. He also sings the praises of those who are working to reduce preventable deaths to zero.

Read more at TIME.

Quality Measures and Nursing

Despite the $2.3 trillion spent on U.S. health care, public and private payers still have a hard time measuring whether the kind of care they are paying for is of the highest value and produces the best outcomes. Nurses represent the largest group of health care professionals in the United States and have a direct affect on patient care, yet quality measures historically have focused on treatment of conditions or diseases, not on the care delivered by nurses. That changed in 2004, when the National Quality Forum (NQF) endorsed the first set of nationally standardized performance measures to assess the quality of care provided by nurses who work in hospitals.

By focusing on patient centered outcome measures such as prevalence of pressure ulcers and falls, as well as restraint use and frequency of catheter-associated infections, the NQF began to examine the link between what nurses do and the quality of care they provide. INQRI has played an important role in adding to the evidence about the utility of the NQF-endorsed Nursing Sensitive Measures by promoting the development and testing of new measures designed to both improve care and nursing performance, as well as reduce costs.
 
Click here to download a research synthesis on this topic.

INQRI Director: "Nurses play a central role in the prevention of hospital readmissions."

Hospital readmission and emergency department utilization within the first 30 days following hospital discharge represent adverse, potentially avoidable, and costly outcomes of hospitalization.

In a new article for Nurse Week, Cathryn Domrose writes about the success INQRI director, Mary Naylor, has had with her transitional care model to help reduce hospital readmissions. In fact, Naylor’s studies have shown an average per patient savings of $5,000 one year after hospitalization.

For more information on the transitional care model, please click here.

INQRI researchers Marianne Weiss and Olga Yakusheva have recently completed their project, "A Quality and Cost Analysis of Nurse Practice Predictors of Readiness for Hospital Discharge and Post-Discharge Outcomes." This interdisciplinary team broke new ground by linking the unit-level nurse practice environment and nursing care processes with patient outcomes at discharge and post-hospitalization. Specifically, the study examined direct and indirect causal relationships between the nursing practice environment, the discharge teaching process and readiness for hospital discharge with hospital readmission and emergency department utilization.

Are Hospital Rankings Popularity Contests or Measures of Quality?

In an article published yesterday, Janice Simmons wonders if hospital rankings are true measures of quality.

Each year since 1990, U.S. News & World Report has ranked more than 5,000 hospitals in a variety of categories.  They present a "Top 50" in each one, with the goal of helping consumers select the hospital that is right for them.  However, a study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine claims that the standings do not really reflect objective measures of quality.

Tell us what you think - are rankings true quality measures?

Center to Champion Nursing in America Releases Latest E-Newsletter

This week, the Center to Champion Nursing in America (CCNA), an initiative of AARP, the AARP Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, released the second edition of its Champion Nursing Quarterly News Digest.  This latest edition addresses the role of nurses in health care reform, including meeting the increased demand as more patients enter the health care system.


Read the April issue of the newsletter.