NUR 3643-Module 9 Course Project Assignment-Significance of Identified Practice Problem Plan for Evaluation

Goals 

• The critical care nurses will report fewer symptoms of burnout six months after the self-care education.
• The critical care nurses will report using the self-care strategies learned in the course six months after the education.

Data Necessary for Evaluation 

To evaluate the educational course, a questionnaire would need to be completed by the nurses participating in the intervention before, immediately after, six months, and twelve months after the intervention. This questionnaire would include questions evaluating the course itself, their symptoms of burnout, and their use of self-care strategies. Patients would also complete surveys at the same time intervals to evaluate the quality of patient care. Nurse managers and administrators would provide data on nursing errors and patient complaints before and throughout the first year after the implementation of the intervention.

Data Analysis

 Questionnaires given to critical care nurses to evaluate burnout would include questions about depersonalization, emotional exhaustion, and personal accomplishment (Couser, 2020). They would also include questions about their self-care habits and strategies used. These questions would be answered in formats of true or false and a range of answers between strongly agree to disagree (Couser, 2020). These answers would be collected and put into percentages to be analyzed to determine the success of the intervention.

The surveys given to the patients would be collected and analyzed in the same fashion as those given to the critical care nurses. The information provided by the nurse managers and administrators would be analyzed by looking at the trend of errors, complaints of the patients, and rate of turnover. This data would evaluate if the errors and complaints correlate with the reports of burnout symptoms.

Plan to Sustain Practice Change

 To sustain this intervention, the facility would need to hire a team to conduct these self-care educational courses. They would need to have an education in psychology and be able to revise the course based on participant feedback. Another resource that would sustain the benefits of the educational course would be to provide informational tools to the staff. These informational tools could include self-care manuals provided at the course to take home, posters about self-care in the break rooms, and self-care reminders at the nurse’s stations. These resources would provide everyday reminders to the nurses of the strategies they learned between their courses and to continue to practice them.

One key indicator that shows continuous quality improvement of this research question would be critical care nurses reporting a significant decrease in symptoms of burnout. This would include decreased emotional exhaustion, decreased depersonalization, and increased personal accomplishment. Turnover rates decreasing after the implementation of the intervention would also indicate that the intervention is successful. Other indicators would include decreased nursing errors, increased patient satisfaction, and increased reports of quality care.

The research team would take the data collected during that year after implementation of the education course and determine what needs to be reevaluated, changed, or stayed the same.

These nurses who have participated in the intervention would help with determining changes that need to be taken to improve the intervention. This would allow the team to make those changes and create a course manual to provide to other facilities to begin a self-care educational course. The data collected would also allow the researchers to determine how often the nurses should take the course and what extra informational tools outside of the course were helpful.

References

Blackburn, L., Thompson, K., Frankenfield, R., Harding, A., & Lindsey, A. (2020). The thrive© program: Building oncology nurse resilience through self-care strategies. Oncology Nursing Forum, 47(1), E25-E34. https://doi.org/10.1188/20.ONF.E25-E34

Couser, G. (2020). Developing a course to promote self-care for nurses to address burnout.

Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 25(3). https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol25No03PPT55

Hastings, C. (2009, April). Nursing at the NIH Clinical Center: Clinical research nursing. https://clinicalc