Nurses should provide patients with assistance whenever it is needed. Standards and core measures as those presented in the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) are the key tools in data analysis that can enhance nurses’ performance and, consequently, outcomes. NDNQI is a quality database that collects and evaluates unit-specific nurse-sensitive data from over 2,000 U.S. and international hospitals (Garrard et al., 2016). Nurses have the chance to actively contribute to the plans provided by NDNQI.
Nurses are meant to be there for patients, to help them recover in the fastest way possible while realizing all the opportunities during a sincere conversation. What is more, nurses often undertake to advocate for patient’s rights. Making a decision can be a challenging task for a patient, and a nurse is the only person who is there to provide them with a proper piece of advice and an objective insight into some types of data. To my mind, the structured data and the benchmarks together constitute a great tool that can be used for improving the performance and empowering patients.
Statistics provide staff with vital information, such as the frequency of a specific occurrence. Moreover, some of the indicators have to be constantly observed in order to prevent them, such as falls with major injuries. Thus, employing the metrics provided by the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators is instrumental in mitigating the everyday challenges of nursing. In order to improve metrics, nurses are expected to actively contribute to the development of proper benchmarks that accurately represent the performance and the outcomes.
Internal dashboards, which are constructed by hospitals with the aim of realizing the weaknesses, actually encourage the sophisticated data collection, which allows for the creation of specific performance indicators. Nurses can utilize the data and the benchmarks and should assist with sorting out the new focuses in the process of prioritization of the indicators.
Reference
Garrard, L., Boyle, D. K., Simon, M., Dunton, N., & Gajewski, B. (2016). Reliability and validity of the NDNQI® injury falls measure. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 38(1), 111–128. Web.