In the clinical care area of nursing, excellent nursing practice is the dynamic process that incorporates the greatest theoretic and practice knowledge in each client. It encompasses the capability to promote health and well-being through the health illness continuum within: the patient; the family; and the community. Excellence involves caring and is essential to accomplish the optimal health outcomes for the patient, registered nurse, and organization. I selected the Student Learning Outcome (SLO) area Excellence in Practice and will discuss the SLO, actively seek to improve practice by researching the literature and national standards. One of the ways to improve practice is by incorporating evidence-based practice (EBP) and research in …show more content…
During the Introduction to Nursing Research class, I was given an opportunity to incorporate both EBP and research to solve an ongoing problem of staffing shortages at my work that has resulted in high rates of patient falls and injuries. I was able to attain the SLO of improving practice by researching the literature and national standards through the Research Utilization Project. I teamed up with my partner Denise to develop a policy to retain nurses that could prevent chaos related to short staffing and other issues such as patient falls and skin alterations due to lack of staffing. My own working environment at my workplace became my motivation to develop the policy based on EBP and research. For the first time in my nursing career, I did research based on research articles as opposed to scholarly articles. Based on the studies, I found out that inadequate nursing staff to patient ratio added to an increase in mortality rates among patients. The purpose of our project was to create a new policy to address the nursing shortage at work and to make a policy to retain nursing staff. Through the research, we came up with a RN staffing retention policy agreements which includes: 1) RN