Nurses form a critical part of the interdisciplinary team dedicated to executing quality nursing care to facilitate better patient outcomes. Adequate nurses are essential to facilitate seamless delegation, lessen work burden, minimize fatigue and ensure job satisfaction. Hence, healthcare organizations need to employ sufficient nurses and ensure their retention by providing a positive work environment with a psychosocial safety climate. The most feasible intervention plan to facilitate this aspect is nurse empowerment, providing an enabling environment, decision-making discretion, leadership involvement, and pay-for-performance incentives. Thus, developing an evaluation plan by considering various elements, including advocacy, future steps, and reflection on leading change and improvement, facilitates better project outcomes.
Evaluation of Plan
The interventions should lead to desirable outcomes that facilitate organizational goal achievement and ensure high-quality healthcare service provision. The significant outcomes of implementing the proposed interventions are attracting and retaining healthcare professionals and fostering job satisfaction, as an essential health workforce need. The intervention plan aims to create incentives and ensure a favorable work atmosphere for interdisciplinary teams, including nurses. Consequently, providing a positive work environment is highly associated with reduced turnover rates and attracts healthcare professionals, including nurses (Maassen et al., 2020). Additionally, job satisfaction is the ultimate goal that will aid in the realization of reduced attrition rates which aligns with the project’s purpose of facilitating better patient outcomes that is feasible through such an outcome. By ensuring job satisfaction and reduced attrition rates, appropriate nurse-to-patient ratios are achievable, which correlates to reduced hospital-acquired infection rates, re-admissions, adverse events, and hospital mortality rates (Maassen et al., 2020). These essential elements display improvement in quality, safety, and care experience. Hence, the outcomes are associated with better approaches to patient care related to pros rather than cons.
Evaluation is crucial in informing the actors of an intervention plan and whether a project was successful. Evaluation of outcome achievement will be through data collection of the elements associated with the outcomes. The elements or data that characterize the attrition rates are the numbers of employees that have left the healthcare organization voluntarily or involuntarily, which can be obtained through employee records. Additionally, job satisfaction elements include various themes such as factors concerning needs, including physical working conditions, payments, and fringe benefits, related needs associated with the social environment, and physical working conditions (Li et al., 2019). The growth needs that need evaluation include career or self-development and management environment (Li et al., 2019). These themes form the basis of assumptions associated with job satisfaction elements. Data collection will be through conducting employee satisfaction surveys, obtaining written feedback through employee suggestion boxes, and employee satisfaction indexes. Hence, employee satisfaction surveys are more appropriate when supplied digitally or using specialized software. For example, the healthcare organization can create a website whereby employees access templates they can fill and the relevant stakeholders make the necessary evaluations. Microsoft Excel is the most common data analysis tool that aids in manipulating spreadsheets since it is a mild to moderate analysis that does not require technicalities. Hence, the evaluation plan reflects on the outcomes associated with the intervention plan and its essential elements.
Discussion
Advocacy
Nurses are significantly involved in advocacy by providing holistic care and facilitating patient-centeredness through individualistic care. Nurses have strong leadership characteristics that include compassion, empathy, awareness, intelligence, and accountability, which are essential in initiating and sustaining change management among interprofessional teams (Anders et al., 2020). They are instrumental as innovators and codesigners in public health and health care systems by continually learning and applying improvements through evidence-based approaches. Through nursing leadership positions, especially in health care boards, nurses can exert influence on organizational policies, cultures, and practices that they can fashion towards promoting quality and experience of care in professional practice and interprofessional teams, which is an assumption that leads to change. Nurses have a critical role in establishing positive relations with patients and interprofessional teams relevant to improving quality and care experience (Anders et al., 2020). Hence, these roles are essential for all healthcare providers to facilitate collaboration toward change.
The intervention plan is set to promote the work environment to be favorable for nurses’ emotional and psychological well-being to improve patient care. The intervention plan improves nursing practice by motivating nurses to provide high-quality healthcare services by facilitating an enabling environment. Additionally, by establishing a positive work environment and creating a psychosocial safety climate, healthcare professionals can share responsibilities in problem-solving and decision-making needed to facilitate patient care plans (Rosen et al., 2018). By creating a positive work environment, healthcare organizations provide an atmosphere for pooling specialized services that enable effective integrated interventions focused on enhancing patient outcomes and ensuring their safety (Rosen et al., 2018). Additional benefits include securing professional development that helps implement the best evidence that improves care experience and patient outcomes. Knowledge gaps include whether a positive work environment can sustain interprofessional collaboration independently. Hence, these approaches are critical in promoting overall patient outcomes and improving health care quality.
Future Steps
Plan modifications are necessary to facilitate project improvements and align them with the organizational culture and practices. The change team can revise the intervention plan by including novel care models and fashioning them to suit a positive work environment that can be instrumental in the project’s success. The shared care model is an appropriate modification that can be essential in fostering a positive work environment that provides an opportunity to provide high-quality and holistic care to support better patient outcomes (Marcussen et al., 2021). This aspect can be feasible when the project incorporates interprofessional expertise to facilitate improved creativity in problem-solving (Marcussen et al., 2021). Additionally, necessary modifications can be through establishing a method for progress monitoring that provides a systematic approach for evaluating outcomes that can be critical in refining the interventions to meet the target population’s desired goals, which is a crucial assumption. Communication is vital in implementing the intervention plan, and technological trends can be instrumental in realizing better outcomes. An example of an emerging technological trend that can improve communication performance is social media use with a broader impact, considering its population base (Chen & Wang, 2021). Social media use in facilitating communication can ensure effective interaction concerning the intervention plans. Hence, revision can be critical to including favorable approaches that can restructure the interventions to meet the target population’s needs.
Reflecting on Leading Change and Improvements
Capstone projects should provide insights to nurses on improving personal practice and inform them about future leadership positions. The capstone project has provided crucial information necessary to facilitate job satisfaction for healthcare workers. Empowering nurses from various angles can foster interprofessional collaboration and professional development. Hence, it provides information on the advocacy roles of nurses and nurse leaders in spearheading change in healthcare organizations through informing on the relevant approaches to ensure job satisfaction and reduce attrition rates. y upholding the leadership role of nurses in initiating and sustaining change in public health and health care systems. Aligning the needs of healthcare workers with organizational goals in future leadership positions can be crucial to harmonize such factors to realize better outcomes. Hence, projects should promote the personal practice and care settings while informing future leadership roles and strategies.
The intervention, implementation, and evaluation plans are necessary and applicable in care settings to realize better patient outcomes. By acknowledging the role of nurses in promoting healthcare systems and influencing quality improvement, the plans are essential in advocating nurses’ role in patient-centered care activities and realizing a safety and care quality culture (Maassen et al., 2020). Furthermore, by recognizing the role of healthcare policies, healthcare organizations can develop appropriate policies suitable for the care environment to facilitate patient-centered care. Nurse leaders can appreciate a positive work environment and psychosocial safety climate in enhancing job satisfaction, reducing attrition rates, and associating it with positive patient outcomes (Maassen et al., 2020). Hence, nurses and nurse leaders are crucial in promoting emotional and psychological wellness in the work environment.
Conclusion
The evaluation plan provides insights on improving the intervention plan and enabling its applicability in the current care settings. The intervention plan outcomes include attracting and retaining healthcare professionals and fostering job satisfaction. The evaluation plan will collect data on various job satisfaction elements such as existence, related, and growth needs through multiple approaches, including employee satisfaction surveys, employee suggestion boxes, and employee satisfaction indexes. Nurses’ roles in leading change include innovation, creating positive relations, and influencing organizational policies, practices, and cultures. Hence, nurse leaders should develop practical approaches to facilitating job satisfaction to realize organizational goal attainment.
References
Anders, R. L., Jackson, D., Davidson, P. M., & Daly, J. P. (2020). Nursing Leadership for 21st Century. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 29. https://doi.org/10.1590/1518-8345.0000.3472
Chen, J., & Wang, Y. (2021). Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(5). https://doi.org/10.2196/17917
Li, H., Yuan, B., Wang, D., & Meng, Q. (2019). Motivating factors on performance of primary care workers in China: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 9(11). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028619
Maassen, S. M., Oostveen, C. V., Vermeulen, H., & Weggelaar, A. M. (2020). Defining a positive work environment for hospital healthcare professionals: A Delphi study. PLoS ONE, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247530
Marcussen, M., Berring, L., Hørder, M., Søndergaard, J., & Nørgaard, B. (2021). Protocol: Development of a model for shared care between general practice and mental healthcare: A protocol for a co-production study. BMJ Open, 12(10). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2022-061575
Rosen, M. A., DiazGranados, D., Dietz, A. S., Benishek, L. E., Thompson, D., Pronovost, P. J., & Weaver, S. J. (2018). Teamwork in Healthcare: Key Discoveries Enabling Safer, High-Quality Care. The American psychologist, 73(4), 433. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000298
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