Nursing practice is dynamic as it evolves to align with patient care requirements and staff demands. Visitor policy is an aspect that we need to pay more attention to at our healthcare facility. Although the current visitor policy has been effective over the years, it would be necessary to revisit the strategy for improving the patient’s satisfaction and health status. This paper will focus on changing the visitor’s policy concerning Lewin’s change theory while considering driving forces and restraints, staff compliances, possible resistances, and unfreezing, moving, and refreezing.
Lewin’s Change Theory
Lewin’s Change Theory consists of three stages: unfreezing, moving, and freezing (Burners, 2020). The abovementioned stages play a significant role in ensuring a fluid change process.
Unfreezing
The initial phase is known as the unfreezing stage. It involves persuading the employees that a change in this policy is essential. This will involve using education and staff meetings. It is essential to make the staff understand the driving forces behind this change:
Driving Forces
Improved patient satisfaction is a primary driving force. It involves improving the friendly visitor policy to create a positive impact on the patient’s experience and satisfaction. Another driving force would be enhanced care quality. A more flexible visitation policy allows for a sped-up patient recovery since their family members serve as sources of recovery support. Moreover, adaptation to patient needs is another driving force to consider. Such shifts follow our policy of centered care based on patients’ wishes for intimacy and meaningfulness with their families.
For the employees, we shall run classes and discuss why this transformation will take place. Staff can air their concerns and queries during these sessions in an open environment.
Moving
The second phase is the moving phase. This is the stage where the implementation of the revised visitor policy takes place. During this phase, we shall use training, role modeling, and mentoring to enforce staff compliance.
Implementation
The most important implementation aspect is training. It involves offering broad-based training to all staff on the new visitor rule (Burners, 2020). The policy details, why the change, the reason behind it, and the importance of compliance shall form part of this training. Furthermore, it will provide directions on informing the patients and their relatives about the new policy.
Another aspect of implementation is role modeling. Here, the leaders and some senior staff shall act as examples by exhibiting proper mannerisms towards patients’ visitors and themselves, following the new guidelines. Other workers will be compelled to accept it after seeing their fellow employees get it.
Additionally, mentorship also plays a crucial role during implementation. It involves having a mentorship program for staff members who may find it difficult to transition with the change. These experienced nurses shall act as mentors to their less experienced colleagues.
Freezing
The final phase is freezing. Here, we shall evaluate the progress in freezing and retraining, reward, monitor, and address any resistance during the sustenance process.
Ensuring Success
Visitor policy will be reinforced through period retraining sessions where concerns, answers, and questions will be raised. Opportunities will be provided for staff members to make inquiries to keep abreast with new policies.
We shall also provide an incentive for our staff members who will implement this change through establishing a reward system. These may be acknowledgment during team meetings, certificates of excellence, or financial incentives for outstanding compliance with the policy.
The visitors’ new policy will be evaluated periodically to identify its effect on patients’ satisfaction and total care quality. Patient feedback, staff compliance, problems or obstacles faced will be generated by data collection.
Constant vigilance is vital, as any defiance and non-compliance must be recognized. The change is expected to remain a success because all new problems that may arise will be handled instantly.
Potential Resistance
The anticipated resistance factors include increased workload. Some staff may view this more lenient visitor policy as an added task to their workload since they would have to accommodate more visitors frequently. Another resistance factor is privacy and security concerns (Khaleghparast et al., 2016). Some staff members will have concerns regarding the safety of patients’ information and violations of security because of the wide door policy. Additionally, disruption in routine is likely to cause resistance. Some people might have become used to a certain policy among the staff, which would create problems of change in their normal routines.
To address these concerns, we will be open and clear on why the change is needed and how it will benefit everybody. Likewise, we will give relevant materials to help employees handle more visitor engagements, like communication tactics or time management methods. Also, we will emphasize the significance of patient-centered care in improving patient outcomes. Lastly, we will seek and address feedback from the employees on how to better do things in order for us to advance.
Evaluation of Change
Ongoing evaluation and monitoring will help identify whether the change in the visitor policy will succeed. Key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the change’s effectiveness include patient satisfaction scores, staff adherence to the new policy, change incidents and concerns, and patients, families, and staff’s qualitative reviews (Khaleghparast et al., 2019).
This change will regularly generate reports on the tracking of this progress as well as its results. Any problem that may emerge while conducting the evaluation will be dealt with without delay, and where necessary, the policy or its implementation will be adjusted accordingly.
Overall, the proposed change of visitor policy is intended to improve service delivery and patient satisfaction. We can successfully manage this change by using Lewin’s Change Theory and addressing the driving and restraining factors, staff compliance, possible resistance, and the three stages of unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Some key elements for effectively implementing this change include open communication, education, training, role modeling, mentoring, retraining, rewarding, evaluation, and monitoring. The overall objective is to design and offer better care and patient satisfaction while meeting the needs of the patients and staff.
References
Burnes, B. (2020). The origins of Lewin’s three-step model of change. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 56(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886319892685
Khaleghparast, S., Joolaee, S., Ghanbari, B., Maleki, M., Peyrovi, H., & Bahrani, N. (2016). A review of visiting policies in intensive care units. Global journal of health science, 8(6). https://doi.org/10.5539%2Fgjhs.v8n6p267
Khaleghparast, S., Joolaee, S., Maleki, M., Peyrovi, H., Ghanbari, B., & Bahrani, N. (2019). New visiting policy: A step toward nursing ethics. Nursing ethics, 26(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733017703701
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