Hospitals face growing tensions and tradeoffs when allocating nurses between the competing priorities of direct patient care and quality improvement efforts, according to a study released March 20 by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the study included interviews with hospital leaders in Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Seattle to examine the role of nurses in hospital quality improvement activities.
According to the HSC study report, The Role of Nurses in Hospital Quality Improvement, hospital organizational cultures set the stage for quality improvement, including nurses’ involvement. Hospitals with supportive leadership, a philosophy of quality as everyone’s responsibility, individual accountability, physician and nurse champions, and effective feedback reportedly offer greater promise for successfully involving nurses in quality improvement activities.
Even when hospitals are committed to including nurses in quality improvement, they often face various problems, including a shortage of nurses; growing demands to participate in more, often duplicative, quality improvement activities; the burdensome nature of data collection and reporting; and shortcomings of traditional nursing education in preparing nurses for their role in today’s contemporary hospital setting, the study found. Read the report.
