Research & Decide. Choose and begin researching a significant quality issue. It can be anything that you believe is vital to patient safety and/or improving overall quality of care. Reliable research needs to be less than 5 years old ideally. The best research are peer-reviewed journal articles, or are written by respectable organizations and expert professionals.
Some topic examples may include:
• Hand hygiene, to include nosocomial infections driving healthcare costs
• Medication errors, to include transcription errors or staffing issues. How does fixed hospital budgets fit in?
• Patient falls, to include alarm fatigue or short hospital stays – Who pays the cost if a patient falls while in the hospital?
• Bed sores acquired in the hospital. Who pays if the patient gets a bed sore while at the hospital?
• Misdiagnosis and how that affects short and long-term patient care. How does that affect healthcare costs?
• Issues with patient identification – may tie into treatment errors and billing issues.
• Documentation quality and how it negatively affects reimbursement and drives hospital costs.
• Budget costs limiting up-to-date technology or research-based interventions from being implemented.
• Inter-departmental communication, to include nursing triage and efficient, safe decision-making. Consider if this is an effective use of time management and how it can be improved.
