Practice Experience: Identifying a Practice Problem in Need of Improvement

The problem is pain control in dying patient or at the end of life - Hospice care

In this week’s Discussion, you shared your experiences with health care practice problems as a consumer and/or as a practitioner. Now, consider your current practice setting and think about something specific and relevant to your practice setting that you would like to see improved or changed. Interview a key leader in your practice setting who can confirm that your practice problem is one that should be addressed to enhance delivery or performance in the field. It is important to remember from the beginning that your practice problem must be measurable, and that you identify data that suggests a problem exists, and although this comes up more specifically in Week 2, it is important to consider this from the start.

This will be the problem discussed in your Practice Experience Project, Capstone Paper, and Storyboard.

By Day 4

Identify a measurable patient-centered practice problem related to quality or safety and relevant to your practice setting that you will also focus on in your Capstone Paper, and post a brief description of the problem and an explanation of why you selected it. Explain how the conversation you had with the key leader in your practice setting impacted your decision to address this particular practice problem. Be sure to support your practice problem with the literature that indicates the relevance of this problem for nursing practice. Provide evidence from your practice area and describe the data that is available.

You will not be collecting any data during the practice experience project; you will use data already available to you in your workplace or other practice setting. Think about the different kinds of data that is shared with you in your work area. For example, data may include patient satisfaction scores, medication error rates, fall, CLABSI or CAUTI rates. Analyzing the data available to you is how you will identify that a quality problem exists. Data identifies potential areas for improvement, and monitors the effectiveness of any changes. It is important to obtain baseline data before beginning a quality improvement project and to analyze results during and at the end of a project.