Intentional Nurse Leader Rounding on Patients Daily

The patients voice is never as important as it is now. The patient care experience is directly correlated with nurse leadership at all levels. The patient care environment where cost cutting can interupt the patient centered focus, is at the core of nurse leader (charge nurse, manager, director, executive) competence to meet the financial challenges of providing outcome-based nursing care in our global nursing community.

This evidence-based project focused on implementing intentional nurse leader rounding daily on all patients in a 34-bed medical/surgical unit. The daily rounding was based on a hybrid program based on the scholarly literature and patient care experience models from the global community. There was a heavy influence used by the researcher using the Studer principles and guidelines of purposeful nurse leader rounding. Pre-education and training was conducted with the nurse manager and charge nurses who were charged with intentional rounding daily. This framework provided a consistent launch of the project with consistency using checklists and iTool used for collecting responses to prescribed questions asked by nurse leaders daily with patient and family members. Autonomy for nurse leaders during rounding to act on service recovery is a strong consideration to be made by nurse executives fro service recovery guidelines. The data collected with rounding is an essential element of the nurse leader rounds. This collected data on an iTool with rounding software provides support for interventions and real-time scoring, tracking and trending of narrative documentation by the nurse leader. The aggregate data of rounding can be analyzed to change culture and drive behaviors and performance of patient care team. Additionally, data will support recognizing the patient care team through feedback from the patients and family members which support improved staff engagement, which in turn is demonstratable back to the patient care experience.

The unit where the project was completed will provide the source of discussion of anticiapted and learned outcomes with the use of nurse leader rounding. There was a notable 10% increase in patient experience scores on this unit within the 60-days of the project. This elevated the patient experience scores beyond the 50th percentile with some scores in the 75th percentile. The unit was performing below the 50th percentile in the United States prior to this intervention. The project is being sustained and replicated in other inpatient and outpatient units in the organization as best practice.