Importance Of Risk Management In Health Care

UNIT MQQ 553–QUALITY AND RISK MANAGEMENT

LECTURER NAME: Benu Chatterjee

TOPIC NAME
Risk Management and Quality Improvement in Health Care

Submission Date: 20th Nov 2014

Student Name: Bushra Zafar
Student ID: 876036 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary 3
Introduction 4
Evaluation 5
Quality Nursing Care 5
Qualitative Measures 6
Risk Management Plan and Quality Improvement Plan 7
Conclusion 9
Bibliography 10

Executive Summary

Introduction

Quality improvement efforts and risk management are complementary, and together are key modules of clinical governance. Risk management reinforces quality management in healthcare. This leads to:
• Improvement in quality and patient safety
• Improvement in efficiency through productivity

They are in the key position to introduce interventions and strategies related to patient safety. Once of the critical impact on patient safety by nurses in all settings is the capability to coordinate and integrate the numerous aspects of patient care provided by all involved.
The five criteria to define ‘quality nursing care’ would be:
• Sufficient number of nurses
• Suitable mix of skillset (eg. registered nurses, nursing assistants etc…)
• Nurses with clinical experience and education for the task at hand
• Practical workload for nurses
• Adequate resources to enable nurses to deliver the best possible care.
One of the key responsibilities for nurses is to help the patients in understanding the medical intervention planned for them and the things they can do to assist in their case, including list of things they should and shouldn’t do during the treatment till recovery.
Research has shown that some clinical quality measures are strongly related to good nursing care (NorthWestern Memorial Hospital, 2014). They way that a nurse performs each and every activity has a substantial impact on quality of healthcare. This can also be seen in the understanding of patients that a good relationship with a compassionate, well-informed and capable nurse can help in the well-being and effectiveness of the care they

(SBS, Quality Improvement Steps Chapter 4, 2014)
The Norma Lang model of quality assurance can be seen in Figure 2, and can be applied to improve the quality of nursing care: Figure 2
1. Description: This is the first phase and is where identification of the values is done that lead us to gaps in communications in nursing. A criterion for standard is then selected.
2. Measurement: This is the second phase and is where the measurement is done between what is practiced to what is the standard set internally/ externally. The outcome is then used to decide on what changes are required, if any. A SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) can be used here.
3. Action: This is the third and final phase where the corrective action is identified, chosen and finally implemented.
As quality assurance is a continuous process, the steps will be repeated indefinitely until no more changes are required.