Jill Scott-Cawiezell

Exploring nursing home staff's perceptions of communication and leadership to facilitate quality improvement

Leadership and clinical staff were surveyed to explore communication and leadership in nursing homes. Registered nurses and other professionals perceived communication as better than their nursing colleagues did. Overall, results suggest all factors of communication could improve. In terms of leadership, licensed practical nurses perceived less clarity of expectations, encouragement of initiative, and support than other groups. The study provides insight into what is organizationally necessary to improve quality of care in nursing homes.

Nursing Home Error and Level of Staff Credentials

Providing safe nursing home care is both a clinical and fiscal challenge in many countries. The fiscal realities result in the addition of other workers, such as medication technicians or aides (CMT/A), to the health care team. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of various levels of credentialing among nursing home staff who deliver medications (RN, LPN, or CMT/A) on medication error. In addition, the impact of distractions and interruptions was explored. Using naïve observation, 39 medication administrators representing various levels of credentialing were unobtrusively observed to determine the number of medication errors, distractions, and interruptions in five nursing homes. There were no differences in medication error rates by level of credential. However, RNs had more interruptions during their medication administration, and these increased interruptions were associated with increased medication error rates when wrong time errors were excluded (p = .0348).

Nursing home culture: a critical component in sustained improvement.

In the third in a series of articles exploring working conditions and quality improvement in nursing homes, 31 nursing homes were surveyed using an adaptation of the Competing Values Framework (CVF) Organizational Assessment. The CVF provides information about the organizational culture through describing dominant perceived values, distribution of values across organizational characteristics, and orientation of values toward flexibility. Staff reported a dominant group culture, reflecting a family and team orientation within their settings. Leaders, however, were more often reported to reflect a hierarchy value orientation, emphasizing efficiency of operations and following rules and procedures.

Nursing home safety: a review of the literature.

The number of older persons in the United States is rapidly growing and, based on this growth projection, the number of consumers needing nursing home (NH) care will likely triple in the next 10 years. Although NHs have been bombarded and scrutinized about the care that they provide, the concept of safety (specifically, error prevention) remains at the margin of most quality improvement efforts. The purpose of this review is to explore what has recently been written (2000–2005) about the evolution of the NH as an organization focused on safety and the most critical clinical processes that must be closely monitored for a safe NH environment to occur. After a thorough review of both organizational and clinical NH literature, 30 organizational studies and 39 clinically based studies were reviewed. The review revealed that, organizationally, teamwork, communication, and leadership all were critical in resident and staff outcomes and clinically, assessment was an important missing process at critical points in the residents’ care for prevention and timely treatment of potentially dangerous conditions. The value of the registered nurse (RN) in this setting was clear in the many assessment issues noted and the lack of RN guidance for adherence to recognized practice guidelines. To explicate the role of the RN, first, better outcome measures must be developed that are nurse sensitive. A second clear agenda for NH research is the explication of the role of leadership, particularly nursing leadership, to create an environment where open and accurate communication can be accomplished among all of the diverse NH roles. This will help all members of the team to identify care improvement opportunities. Finally, a new frontier for the NH setting is the use of technology and the need to harness the information that has set in the NH system for years. Information mastery for staff and leadership is a necessary aspect of the organization that must be developed to provide sound information for strategic and focused change to occur.

Linking nursing home working conditions to organizational performance.

Abstract: Exploring selected working conditions and performance in nursing homes suggests that high and low performers can be determined based on both quantitative and qualitative findings.

Cost, staffing and quality impact of bedside electronic medical record (EMR) in nursing homes.

OBJECTIVE There is growing political pressure for nursing homes to implement the electronic medical record (EMR) but there is little evidence of its impact on resident care. The purpose of this study was to test the unique and combined contributions of EMR at the bedside and on-site clinical consultation by gerontological expert nurses on cost, staffing, and quality of care in nursing homes. METHODS Eighteen nursing facilities in 3 states participated in a 4-group 24-month comparison: Group 1 implemented bedside EMR, used nurse consultation; Group 2 implemented bedside EMR only; Group 3 used nurse consultation only; Group 4 neither. Intervention sites (Groups 1 and 2) received substantial, partial financial support from CMS to implement EMR. Costs and staffing were measured from Medicaid cost reports, and staff retention from primary data collection; resident outcomes were measured by MDS-based quality indicators and quality measures. RESULTS Total costs increased in both intervention groups that implemented technology; staffing and staff retention remained constant. Improvement trends were detected in resident outcomes of ADLs, range of motion, and high-risk pressure sores for both intervention groups but not in comparison groups. DISCUSSION Implementation of bedside EMR is not cost neutral. There were increased total costs for all intervention facilities. These costs were not a result of increased direct care staffing or increased staff turnover. CONCLUSIONS Nursing home leaders and policy makers need to be aware of on-going hardware and software costs as well as costs of continual technical support for the EMR and constant staff orientation to use the system. EMR can contribute to the quality of nursing home care and can be enhanced by on-site consultation by nurses with graduate education in nursing and expertise in gerontology.

Keeping patients safe in healthcare organizations: a structuration theory of safety culture.

AIM This paper presents a discussion of the use of structuration theory to facilitate understanding and improvement of safety culture in healthcare organizations. BACKGROUND Patient safety in healthcare organizations is an important problem worldwide. Safety culture has been proposed as a means to keep patients safe. However, lack of appropriate theory limits understanding and improvement of safety culture. DATA SOURCES The proposed structuration theory of safety culture was based on a critique of available English-language literature, resulting in literature published from 1983 to mid-2009. CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, ABI/Inform and Google Scholar databases were searched using the following terms: nursing, safety, organizational culture and safety culture. DISCUSSION When viewed through the lens of structuration theory, safety culture is a system involving both individual actions and organizational structures. Healthcare organization members, particularly nurses, share these values through communication and enact them in practice, (re)producing an organizational safety culture system that reciprocally constrains and enables the actions of the members in terms of patient safety. This structurational viewpoint illuminates multiple opportunities for safety culture improvement. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING Nurse leaders should be cognizant of competing value-based culture systems in the organization and attend to nursing agency and all forms of communication when attempting to create or strengthen a safety culture. CONCLUSION Applying structuration theory to the concept of safety culture reveals a dynamic system of individual action and organizational structure constraining and enabling safety practice. Nurses are central to the (re)production of this safety culture system.

Randomized Multilevel Intervention to Improve Outcomes of Residents in Nursing Homes in Need of Improvement

OBJECTIVES A comprehensive multilevel intervention was tested to build organizational capacity to create and sustain improvement in quality of care and subsequently improve resident outcomes in nursing homes in need of improvement. DESIGN/SETTING/PARTICIPANTS Intervention facilities (N = 29) received a 2-year multilevel intervention with monthly on-site consultation from expert nurses with graduate education in gerontological nursing. Attention control facilities (N = 29) that also needed to improve resident outcomes received monthly information about aging and physical assessment of elders. INTERVENTION The authors conducted a randomized clinical trial of nursing homes in need of improving resident outcomes of bladder and bowel incontinence, weight loss, pressure ulcers, and decline in activities of daily living. It was hypothesized that following the intervention, experimental facilities would have higher quality of care, better resident outcomes, more organizational attributes of improved working conditions than control facilities, higher staff retention, similar staffing and staff mix, and lower total and direct care costs. RESULTS The intervention did improve quality of care (P = .02); there were improvements in pressure ulcers (P = .05) and weight loss (P = .05). Organizational working conditions, staff retention, staffing, and staff mix and most costs were not affected by the intervention. Leadership turnover was surprisingly excessive in both intervention and control groups. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS Some facilities that are in need of improving quality of care and resident outcomes are able to build the organizational capacity to improve while not increasing staffing or costs of care. Improvement requires continuous supportive consultation and leadership willing to involve staff and work together to build the systematic improvements in care delivery needed. Medical directors in collaborative practice with advanced practice nurses are ideally positioned to implement this low-cost, effective intervention nationwide.

Influencing Leadership Perceptions of Patient Safety Through Just Culture Training

There are differences in perceptions of safety culture between healthcare leaders and staff. Evidence suggests that an organizations actual safety performance is more closely reflected in staff perceptions suggesting that frontline staff may be more aware than the leadership of actual patient safety challenges within their organization. Closing the perception gap between healthcare leaders and staff is critical to aligning the resources and strategies required to create a true culture of safety.

A just culture: the role of nursing leadership.

THE Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human sparked a nationwide focus on medical errors and the risk to patient safety.1 Importantly, the Institute of Medicine confirmed that the majority of medical errors are not the fault of people but rather faulty systems, processes, and conditions that le