The delivery of quality healthcare is the main aim of any healthcare organizations. Quality care contributes to the realization of outcomes of care that include patient satisfaction, empowerment, adherence to treatment, and reduction of healthcare costs. The ability of nurses and healthcare organizations to deliver quality care depends largely on their focus on quality indicators. Quality indicators reflect a number of aspects in nursing that include process, outcome and structural indicators. The realization of the developed sensitive or quality indicators in an organization implies that the outcome, process and structural processes are effective in the organization. Therefore, this presentation examines a selected nursing-sensitive quality indicator and its related aspects that include NDNQI, nursing sensitive quality indicators, importance of the selected indicator and collection of data related to it.
NDNQI and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators
The NDQI is a national database that was established for the collection of nursing quality indicators. The nursing quality indicators provide insights into the quality of nursing care given in different health organizations in the state. The American Nurses Association developed NDNQI in 1998 with the aim of developing knowledge in nursing about the factors that are critical in influencing the quality of nursing care to the patients. One of the goals of NDNQI is to develop national data that can be used to measure the relationship between patient outcomes and nurse staffing (Arnold-Long et al., 2018). The other goal of the NDQI is to provide the participant hospitals with the national comparative data of the nursing sensitive indicators for quality improvement initiatives.
As noted above, nursing sensitive quality indicators are sources of data that provide information about the structure, patient and process outcomes of nursing care. The structure outcomes in nursing include aspects such as knowledge and skills of the staffs, education and professional development of the staffs and supply of the nursing staff. Process outcomes focus on the interventions that are used to achieve the desired outcomes of care, job satisfaction level of the staffs and the effectiveness of the organizational processes utilized in the delivery of care. Outcomes focus on aspects such as the realization of the objectives of patient care. An improvement or realization of outcomes of care provides insights into the effectiveness of the adopted process interventions. The nursing sensitive quality indicators that are monitored in the NDQI are varied. They include nursing hours in a patient day, nursing turnover rate, nosocomial infections, patient falls, patient falls with injuries, pressure ulcer rate, pediatric pain assessment, pediatric peripheral intravenous infiltration, registered nurses survey, registered nurses’ education, restraints, and staff matrix (Ju et al., 2018; Koch et al., 2020). Hospitals that are members of the NDQI are expected to voluntary provide data on these sensitive data to guide the implementation of quality improvement initiatives and evidence-based practice initiatives in nursing.
Place your order