Understanding of Nursing-Sensitive Indicators Towards Patient Care

In this era of providing total patient safety, quality indicators that are associated with the nursing profession have drastically evolved from nursing–sensitive to the adverse event –sensitive. Such an understanding of the nursing-sensitive indicators becomes an inevitable aspect within the healthcare service provision. This would ensure that the nursing staff and the general healthcare staff are in a position to fully formulate, compare and contrast the available quality indicator tools which are associated with the nurse staffing outcomes (Page, 2014).

The case study of one Mr. J outlines a explicit scenario in which the nursing-sensitive indicators brings to the attention of the public the aspect of urgent need for the understanding, improving, measuring and ensuring that quality of healthcare services are at par and to the best of service to the patient. The elements of importance encompassed within the nursing-sensitive indicators of the health care quality are revealing serious health care system errors and ensuring patient safety concerns, recommendation of quality attributes for the health care system, making a proposal of quality enhancement initiatives in coordination of quality related efforts, making recommendations for the interdisciplinary education within health professions, and ensuring identification of the changes needed in the working environment for the nurses to achieve improved patients safety.

Moreover, such understanding of the nursing-sensitive indicators helps in quality improvement purposes in the allied settings to ensure monitoring of performance and the progress of the healthcare service provision units in order to support evidence-based decision making (American Nurses Association, 2010). On the other side of the coin, the indicators are a clear basis of being used in supporting informed policy analysis in relation to the regulatory and the accreditation requirements, reimbursement and workforce development.

Finally, the nursing-sensitive indicators form the basis on which researching on the role of nursing care is pegged with the aim of determining the patient safety outcomes as a result of examining the structure-outcome, the process-outcome, and the structure-process-outcome relationships.

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