Wednesday, July 21, 2004: 3:00 PM-4:30 PM | |||
Failure to Rescue: Finding a Feasible, Consistent and Clinical Useful Measure | |||
| Learning Objective #1: Identify common strategies feasible for ongoing measurement of "failure to rescue" in the acute care setting | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Specify parameters of the term "failure to rescue" amenable to standardization across variations in documentation | |||
| Failure to rescue patients who unexpectedly die from complications during hospitalization has been cited as an outcome of insufficient numbers of experienced professional nursing staff. This evidence has been found as a result of analysis of large databases. If failure to rescue is to serve as a useful nurse-sensitive patient outcome measure, however, it must be operationalized in a manner that is both feasible at the local level and consistent across diverse settings. Additionally, any measure must be one that hospital staff can measure on an ongoing basis to monitor trends and evaluate effectiveness of interventions to lower failure to rescue rates. The American Nurses' Credentialing Center has required that hospitals who have attained or who are seeking Magnet Status must select two indicators identified by Needleman and colleagues (2002),and measure these indicators on an ongoing basis. Medical record coding criteria described by Needleman resulted in an almost five-fold over-identification of patients in one 350-bed teaching hospital as determined by in-depth record review. Perhaps more importantly, the manual review provided insight into where future interventions might be focused to decrease failure to rescue. Although more efficient, use of codes to identify records cannot provide that insight. | |||
| Organizer: | Priscilla Sandford Worral, PhD, RN | ||
| Authors: | Priscilla Sandford Worral, PhD, RN Kathryn T. Same, RN, MS, CIC | ||
Evidence-Based Nursing: Strategies for Improving Practice
Sigma Theta Tau International
July 21, 2004