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Making Nursing-Sensitive Quality Indicators Real In Ambulatory Care, Beth Ann Swan

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Pay for performance initiatives are changing the quality landscape.

Gaps exist in quantifying and linking ambulatory care quality indicators to care provided by nurses in ambulatory care.

Ambulatory care quality indicators that are sensitive to nursing care, standardized, and tested need to be identified and adopted by ambulatory care nurses, ambulatory care provider organizations, professional organizations, and endorsed by a consensus organization.

Demonstrating The Value Of The Rn In Ambulatory Care, Beth Ann Swan, Regina Conway-Phillips, Karen F. Griffin

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

During 2003, an estimated 906 million visits were made to physician offices in the United States (Hing, Cherry, & Woodwell, 2005).

Overall, 42% of visits to outpatient settings were attended by a registered nurse (Middleton & Hing, 2005).

Despite ambulatory care being the fastest growing site for care, it is the least studied.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the role of the RN in ambulatory care and describe the direct and indirect economic value of RNs in ambulatory care settings.

Linking Nursing Workload And Performance Indicators In Ambulatory Care, Karen F. Griffin Msn, Rn, Cnaa, Beth Ann Swan Phd, Crnp, Faan

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

More and more ambulatory care organizations are using nursing report cards to monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of nursing care in the ambulatory setting.

Nurse staffing levels is usually one of the items included in a nursing report card and the one most scrutinized by ambulatory care administrators.

One strategy employed by the nursing leadership at the South Texas Veterans Healthcare System to justify nurse staffing levels is linking administrative staffing monitors with nurse-sensitive outcomes via workload and performance indicators.

Through this approach, nurse leaders are able to justify nurse staffing level changes, needed technology changes, process improvements, …

Measuring Nurse Workload In Ambulatory Care, Beth Ann Swan Phd, Crnp, Karen F. Griffin Msn, Rn, Cnaa

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Nurses and adequate nurse staffing are critical to the delivery of safe, cost-effective, and quality patient care in every health care setting.

This has been proven time and again through various research studies and recognized by various accrediting bodies such as JCAHO.

However, the information available on required or optimal ambulatory care nurse staffing is limited and varies across ambulatory care settings.

An overview of instruments for measuring nursing workload in ambulatory care, a critical prerequisite when identifying best nurse staffing models for diverse ambulatory care settings, is provided.

Measuring And Improving Health Care Quality: Nursing's Contribution To The State Of Science, Doris C. Vahey, Beth Ann Swan, Norma M. Lang, Pamela H. Mitchell

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

Concern over the quality of health care is a recurring topic in the United States. A “state of the science” invitational conference on quality health care, titled “Measuring and Improving Health Care Quality, Towards Meaningful Solutions To Pressing Problems, Nursing’s Contribution to the State of the Science” was held April 18–20, 2002 in Philadelphia at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, University of Pennsylvania. This conference stemmed from the work of the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) Expert Panel on Quality Health Care and had its genesis in June 1996 during the AAN Expert Panel on Quality’s Conference titled, “Outcome …

Global Partnerships To Strengthen The Evidence Base For Nursing, Beth Ann Swan Phd, Crnp, Naeema H. Al-Gasseer Phd, Rn, Norma M. Lang Phd, Rn, Faan, Frcn

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

There is a growing emphasis on building the evidence base as governments, health systems, practitioners, and consumers, nationally and globally, search for ways to improve health care outcomes and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of health services.

Nurses and midwives constitute the largest group of health service providers in the majority of health systems around the globe.

The WHO Global Advisory Group on Nursing and Midwifery recommended that WHO should form strategic alliances with partners to identify uniform core indicators and build a solid body of evidence to inform national health policies, particularly in the area of cost-effective nursing and …

Classifying Quality Nursing Care Initiatives: Framework For Ambulatory Surgery Nursing Practice, Beth Ann Swan

College of Nursing Faculty Papers & Presentations

The demand for information about quality is greater now than ever. Despite the significance of quality to consumers, providers, and insurers of health care, information related to this phenomenon, although plentiful, has been plagued by the lack of consistent definitions, frameworks, and outcome measurements. This inconsistency leads to the inability to compare and evaluate patient outcomes from study to study and across practice settings. Assessing recovery, including symptom distress and functioning, is increasingly significant because extended operations requiring longer anesthesia are being performed in the ambulatory surgery setting. Outcomes must be linked to specific processes, and outcome information should include …