The American Nursing Association (ANA) established the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®) in 1998 to track and report on quality indicators heavily influenced by nursing action.
NDNQI® was established as a standardized approach to evaluating nursing performance in relation to patient outcomes. It provides a database and quality measurement program to track clinical performance and to compare nursing quality measures against other hospital data at the national, regional, and state levels. Nursing-sensitive quality indicators help establish evidence-based practice guidelines in the inpatient and outpatient settings to enhance quality care outcomes and initiate quality improvement educational programs, outreach, and protocol development.
The quality indicators the NDNQI® monitors are organized into three categories: structure, process, and outcome. Theorist Avedis Donabedian first identified these categories. Donabedian’s theory of quality health care focused on the links between quality outcomes and the structures and processes of care (Grove, Gray, Jay, Jay, & Burns, 2015).
Nurses must be knowledgeable about the indicators their workplaces monitor. Some nurses deliver direct patient care that leads to a monitored outcome. Other nurses may be involved in data collection and analysis. In addition, monitoring organizations, including managed care entities, exist to gather data from individual organizations to analyze overall industry quality. All of these roles are important to advance quality and safety outcomes.
Assignment Instructions:
- Select a single nursing-sensitive quality indicator that you see as important to a selected type of health care system.
- Conduct independent research on the most current information about the selected nursing-sensitive quality indicator.
- Interview a professional colleague or contact who is familiar with quality monitoring and how technology can help to collect and report quality indicator data. You do not need to submit the transcript of your conversation but do integrate what you learned from the interview into the paper. Consider these questions for your interview:
- What is your experience with collecting data and entering it into a database?
- What challenges have you experienced?
- How does your organization share with the nursing staff and other members of the health care system the quality improvement monitoring results?
- What role do bedside nurses and other frontline staff have in entering the data? For example, do staff members enter the information into an electronic medical record for extraction? Or do they enter it into another system? How effective is this process?
- For this assessment, imagine you are a member of a Quality Improvement Council at any type of health care system, whether acute, ambulatory, home health, managed care, et cetera. Your Council has identified that newly hired nurses would benefit from comprehensive training on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators. The Council would like the training to address how this information is collected and disseminated across the organization. It would also like the training to describe the role nurses have in accurate reporting and high-quality results.
- Include the following: Introduction: Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicator
- What is the NDNQI®?
- What are nursing-sensitive quality indicators?
- Which quality indicator did you select to address?
- Why is this quality indicator important to monitor?
- Be sure to address the impact of this indicator on quality of care and patient safety.
- Why do new nurses need to be familiar with this particular quality indicator when providing patient care?
- According to your interview and other resources, how does your organization collect data on this quality indicator?
- How does the organization disseminate aggregate data?
- What role do nurses play in supporting accurate reporting and high-quality results?
- As an example, consider the importance of accurately entering data regarding nursing interventions.
- Cite a minimum of three scholarly and/or authoritative sources.
