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Nursing Sensitive Indicators

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Nursing Sensitive Indicators The American Nurses Association established national initiatives called nursing-sensitive outcome indicators that focus plans/programs to increase quality and safety in patient care. They gauge aspects of direct patient care related to quality of nursing care by reflecting on structure, process and outcomes of nursing care. Structure in regard to staffing and the skill, education and certification of staff; process in regards to measuring aspects of nursing care related to assessment, intervention and RN job satisfaction, and outcomes by improving the rates of specifics in relation to patient outcomes such as in this particular case preventing hospital acquired pressure ulcers, improving patient satisfaction and restraint prevalence. Nursing Sensitive indicators are only specific to nursing and in 1998, ANA developed a National Data base of nursing quality indicators (NDNQI) so they could continue to collect and build on data from studies to expand nursing knowledge related to factors that influence the quality of nursing care. Why is this important? The nursing profession has the responsibility to measure, evaluate and continually improve practice. NDNQI identify where and how the staff is needed and show the need to increase staff in particular areas of nursing care that need improvement. The NDNQI mission is to help the RN in patient safety and quality improvements by providing research based national and comparative data on nursing care in relation to patient outcomes. In this particular case, if the nurse was educated and had an understanding of nursing indicators, she would be able to identify particular nursing sensitive indicators and apply the knowledge from EBP to improve patient outcomes such as preventing HAPU, restraint prevalence and improving patient satisfaction. Hospital data on specific nursing sensitive

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