University Hospital Health Care System
University Hospital Health Care System
Hello and welcome to the University Hospital Health Care System. My name is Diane Tate. We are so excited to have you on our nursing team. I am here today to help you better understand how our healthcare system uses Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators – also known as the NDNQI – to enhance quality care outcomes, improve training procedures, establish best practices, and improve patient satisfaction. These indicators also help in workflow and the recruitment and retention of quality staff. You play an important part of this. You are our eyes and ears when it comes to safe evidence-based practice and reporting data to help evaluate our Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators.
We are very fortunate to be one of the 1100 facilities in the United States providing the data to NDNQI to fulfill nursing’s commitment to advancing our knowledge base to evaluate and improve patient care. The NDNQI is a national nursing database evaluating nursing care that provides annual and quarterly reporting of three major indicators which evaluate nursing care. In 2018, the authors Griggs, Wiechula & Cusack described those indicators as structure (staff/skill competency), process (patient assessment, nursing intervention, and job satisfaction) and outcome of patient care related to the quantity or quality nursing care. NDNQI is managed by a company named Press Ganey. Press Ganey sends us surveys for the data needed and then provides participating facility research driven reports with statistics and data themes. Multiple authors including Smith (writing in 2018) and Griggs, Wiechula & Cusack point out that this data allows us to understand what we are doing well in our facility and what we need to improve on, in comparison to national data, to enhance patient safety, patient care outcomes, and organizational performance reports.
Now I’d like to share an example, Our Chief Nursing Officer used the NDNQI ratios and acuity data on staffing to validate the need various levels of nurse staffing. Authors Mangold and Pearson, writing 2017, identify how this type of data can contribute to significant changes to our staffing matrix and ratios because of the data produced by nurses like you. Our nurses are better able to provide quality care as a result of this information and our patient satisfaction scores have almost doubled over that past 6 months.
Imagine a small snowball made of 5 pieces of snow, then imagine one made of 100 pieces of snow, and one made of 1100 pieces of snow…the greater the number the bigger the impact. If you were in the snowball fight, do you want the snowball made with five snowflakes or the one made with 1100 snowflakes? The same is true of the data in the NDNQI, when one facility implements a change the data from the change is shared with everyone through NDNQI so the dissemination of information is relatively quick and provides real time evaluation data.
For another example, over the past few months, we have experienced a dramatic rise in catheter-acquired urinary tract infections also known as CAUTIs and Hospital Acquired Conditions throughout the facility. This has dramatically affected the quality of patient care and ultimately our Press Ganey patient satisfaction surveys. Our rate of CAUTIs and Hospital Acquired Conditions have also impacted our rate of Medicare reimbursement. We have experienced a 1 percent reduction in reimbursement related to this CAUTI and associated HAC increase. Porter (2018) estimates CAUTI costs to be over $10,000. To give this number a little more impact, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative reported in 2015 that there was a total of $330 million dollars lost in Hospital Acquired Conditions penalties across 721 facilities.
