Paper
Saturday, July 24, 2004
The Nursing and Health Outcomes Project
Dorothy Pringle, RN, PhD, Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada and Peggy White, RN, MN, Health System Performance Unit, Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Objective: A task force examining nursing in the province of Ontario concluded with a series of recommendations for changes to nursing in response to health care reform and for changes to the system to ensure that the public has access to high quality nursing services. One of the recommendations focused on the need for a method for funding nursing which is responsive to the needs of the health care consumer. This recommendation specified that any funding method should be based on performance standards that promote high quality patient outcomes, and on health information systems that provide comprehensive and reliable data on nursing services. The Nursing and Health Outcomes Project was formed to spearhead the identification of nursing sensitive patient outcomes and their attendant nursing inputs and processes that could collected and housed on existing provincial clinical and administrative databases. This information would allow administrators and researchers in the future to describe how different nursing interventions and different numbers and types of nurses (RNs, RPNs) effect patient outcomes. Methods: This presentation will describe the background to this project and locate this project within the context of international initiatives and current research in the area of nursing sensitive patient outcomes.
Conclusions: The area of outcomes research is rapidly expanding. Much of this research focuses on the area adverse events as these outcomes are readily available on existing databases. However, nursing plays a significant role in other health outcomes. Information on databases must reflect the positive impact of nursing practice on health outcomes across the health care system. Recommendations on how to initiate the process of incorporating the collection of nursing sensitive patient outcomes and relevant nursing inputs on databases will be provided.
Implications: Information on outcomes is essential to further increase accountability in the current health care system.
Back to Indicators for Administrative Databases: What Information Do We Require?
Back to 15th International Nursing Research Congress
Sigma Theta Tau International
July 22-24, 2004