Prepare an 8-10 page data analysis and quality improvement initiative proposal based on a health issue of interest. Include internal and external benchmark data, evidence-based recommendations to improve healthcare quality and safety, and communication strategies to ga

Inter-Professional Perspectives and Communication Strategies to Support Care Quality Improvement

The improvement of quality of care requires multidisciplinary, inter-professional, and stakeholder perspectives and inputs. Inter-professional collaboration in health care is defined by the ability and capability of every health care professional with the team to effectively embrace complementary roles and work cooperatively (Donnelly et al., 2021). Each professional entity has its unique perspective on a particular issue in all inter-professional collaborations. Therefore, different responsibilities must be shared and profession-specific decisions made in order to formulate the best plan to achieve a healthcare goal or solve the current and future healthcare issues. The successful implementation of the proposed QI initiative will require a seamless alignment of all professional and stakeholder inputs. As in all inter-professional and multi-stakeholder teams, the biggest challenge lies in nurturing collaborative relationships that allow for open information sharing and ready support for different professional teams. Trust, respect, communication, and the lack of appreciation of a different profession are the inherent barriers to establishing an effective interprofessional and stakeholder team (Donnelly et al., 2021). However, such obstacles can be intervened by adopting an effective communication strategy to link the inter-professional and stakeholder teams to improve health care.

Effective inter-professional communication allows individuals from varied professional backgrounds to successfully understand and appreciate input from other professions and understand their own professional identity and role with a healthcare team. Effective communication between the inter-professional teams and other stakeholders will promote team collaboration and create a synergy that will support the efficient progress of the initiative to deliver safe and high-quality patient care. The improvement of a specific area within the health care system or facility requires constant communication between teams, members, and stakeholders. It requires comparative reporting, simulations of the initiatives, and reporting milestones to motivate the teams to keep up with their efforts. Such reporting may require constant meetings and conferences to communicate. This can negatively impact the team members’ work-life balance and overall quality of life. Therefore, to overcome these impacts and the challenge to communication and reporting, I propose using multidisciplinary audio and video conferencing with recordable sessions and a report-sharing platform where all team members can review and share comments on progress during their free time.

Conclusion

Quality of care is always the focus of all healthcare service providers. Improved stakeholder engagement in the definition of symptoms will result in early action towards the end-of-life care process with better health outcomes for patients. It will also create a bigger market for the hospice due to improved awareness. Through the use of community health reports from multidisciplinary inputs and inter-professional health models, the initiative can make better use of predictive population health analytics to target patients and provide early and timely interventions to patients in need. Subsequently, this will improve the quality of the health outcomes by reducing the number of inadequate symptom relief cases. It will also reduce LOS and IPU admissions significantly, reducing hospice nurses’ workload. A reduced workload further helps nurses better their practice and create a balance between their personal lives and work life. The initiative to improve care quality in SAMC will result in happier staff members with the residents receiving the best care. Therefore, improving the quality of care will improve patient and stakeholder satisfaction and constant growth for SAMC.

References

Barnett, N. (2018). Person-centered over patient-centered care: not just semantics. Clin Pharm, 10(4).

Boyle, D. K., & Baernholdt, M. (2021). Overview of the Quality Health Outcomes Model. In Nurses Contributions to Quality Health Outcomes (pp. 3-17). Springer, Cham.