Nursing leadership for the management of quality improvement and patient safety for the outpatient clinic
Ilana Kan
Rambam Health Care Campus, Israel
: J Nurs Patient Care
Abstract
Leadership for quality means making it possible for everyone, every day to do better job with greater satisfaction, learning from and with their colleagues in order to improve services. It is crucial that every organization will have a framework to support ongoing quality improvement and patient safety. Nurse involvement is essential to any significant healthcare improvement initiative. As nurse leader managers and organizers, we should support our staff in developing knowledge, skills and attitudes in quality improvement and safety, by providing the learning and development opportunities or activities suitable for their role. Quality and safety are rooted in the daily work of all staff at the facility. At Rambam outpatient clinics, we establish a framework for placing nursing on the frontlines of transforming healthcare. Our goal is to provide safe care and services based on scientific evidence practice to all patients. We take efforts to ensure that all clinical plans are based on individual patient preferences, needs and values. To achieve this goal we put focus on transformational leadership at all levels of nursing. We engage and empower nurses to act as leaders in ensuring high quality patient care. We train our nurses to be leaders who can create and implement programs, products, environments to meet the patient population needs. Our strategy is to provide organizational learning opportunities for individual leaders (head nurses of outpatient clinic) and leadership teams (clinical mentor) in order to create tools and programs for all levels of nursing. For example, a training program for better compliance of hand hygiene. We create appropriate assessment tools for ongoing analysis of the current state of knowledge amongst all medical teams, quality of fulfillment of medical records and applying core principles. Staff meetings, nurse research and poster presentations provide educational platforms and involve all outpatient clinic nurses in the leading process.
Biography
Ilana Kan pursued her MA Degree at the University of Haifa (Israel). She is the Head Nurse of Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and a Vice Head Nurse of Ambulatory Outpatient Clinic at Rambam Health Care Campus, Haifa, Israel.
E-mail: i_kan@rambam.gov.il
