Measuring Performance Standards

Introduction:

Nurse plays a vital role to ensure high quality and patient centered care. Input from nursing staff is a part of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach of providing optimal health care to patients. Pay for performance to nurse is measured by core activities for which nurse are responsible and improve nursing staff overall level. It is difficult to measure nursing performance. Nurse perform multitasks most of the times. Hence it may or may not be possible for a patient to get the entire care provided by health care providers. Measuring nursing performance standards was posed with major challenge of assessing.

Taking up the challenge:

National Quality Forum (NQF) provided solution to challenge in 2003. They have created a series of standards to measure nursing performance and also evaluate their quality assurance. They were referred as nursing sensitive care standards. NQF nursing sensitive measures are as follows.

• Patient centered measures
  • Occurrence of inpatient falls, pressure ulcers, restrained patients
  • Rate of urinary tract infections and blood stream infections and pneumonia
  • Surgical inpatients death
• Nursing centered measures
  • Heart failure and pneumonia
  • Acute heart attack
• System centered measures
  • Registered nurse percentage
  • Specific nursing care personnel
  • Nursing care hours
  • Participation in hospital affairs
  • Resource adequacy
  • Voluntary turn over
  • Nursing category

 This standard measures helps in identifying quality care assessment. These standards are greatly predisposed by nursing personnel. It is used both for assessment of private health and public health standards in hospitals. Later hospitals compare method and premier demonstration program was introduced into health care system. Federal agency for health care research and quality has designed many nursing indicators to examine the nurse staffing influence and outcome. Grant incentives were introduced in the name of ‘Interdisciplinary nursing quality research initiative mainly for measuring nursing contribution to analyze effective medical improvements.

Questions:

• Why that nursing process performance measure is is difficult?
• What is pay for performance?
• What are nursing sensitive measures given by National Quality Forum?