Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

Personal Improvement Project Plan

Quality improvement is essential in the healthcare system, especially for healthcare facilities and nursing staff. That is because it helps ensure that the healthcare facilities provide the safest and quality healthcare services to the patients while ensuring that nursing staff balances their overall work for productivity and well-being (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2019-c).

Project Aim

My improvement project aims to improve how I handle and balance my work and home life and work closer to my standard 40 hours a week. Currently, I am working well over 40 hours, thus failing to meet my goal of spending quality time with my family. Therefore, the table will incorporate my workdays but exclude the weekends. The main reason for prioritizing my work and home life balance is because I have identified that my mental health status has been deteriorating ever since I accepted the nurse manager role. Prioritizing my time management will create a culture of well-being and will allow me to recharge instead of depleting my happiness. Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

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My concerns with my lack of home and work life balance, is creating a doubt in my mind that maybe I am not the right person for this nurse manager role. However, I am hopeful I will become more productive in my work and improve my relationships with my husband and children through my personal quality improvement project on time management. I will incorporate some crucial components in my project, including process analysis, measurement, changes, and project reflection and application.

Process Analysis

Quality improvement projects require engaging with effective models and procedures to identify the issues that may lead to an adverse effect. For instance, if I do not identify the main issue that influences my work-life balance, it may affect my well-being and relationship with my family. My plan will involve a root cause analysis method to identify all loopholes that may influence my quality improvement approach (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2019-d). Hence, the process I plan to take is to start with an improvement in my daily work hours each week for four weeks.

As Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2022) postulates, process mapping Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

in a project is essential since it helps one identify the process and task owners and outline the expected timelines. As a result, I will build on each step by adding another tool to try and improve my hours. For example, in week 1, I will not engage any tool to evaluate how many hours I will work to act as my improvement process control. In week 2, I will write down the estimated time and tasks needing to be covered within that week. For Week 3, I will incorporate an alarm as a prompt to control the hours I work, especially in marking the completion of my hours. Lastly, in week 4, I will add an alarm to help me complete all tasks without delay. That will involve a 15-minute alarm that will notify me 15 minutes before departure. Furthermore, I will ensure that these alarms are on repeat mode to prevent me from forgetting to set them. The process mapping was made possible by collaborating with my director.

(Figure 1)

Measurement

According to Wolfe, Taylor, and Subramanyam (2021), quality improvement measurement results in various improvement activities while looking at defining key processes or outcomes; the collection of relevant and substantial data; and analyzing and interpreting these data. Measurement helps evaluate current performance, set realistic goals, and monitor improvement interventions and efforts (Johnson & Sollecito, 2020). In that case, I chose to do my data collection by tallying every day’s work for the four weeks (Figure 2). Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

(Figure 2)

As a result, I connected with my director to develop different tools to use each week but added them to the previous tools utilized each week (Figure 3).

Personal Improvement Data Collection

(Figure 3)

In the first week, I planned to work typically without any adjustment since I had already identified ways to document my hours, accordingly, thus knowing when I would work more than 40 hours weekly. However, for the second week, I made lists of the work that needed to be covered daily during morning hours. The reason was to ensure that I would perfectly organize my tasks, including an attempt to plan out my schedule. My results showed some progress, but it was still unfortunate since as I was still working for over 40 hours. The main strength of writing down tasks is that I would view them clearly and estimate how long they would take. For instance, when I needed to leave by 4.30 pm, I made it a routine to pause all remaining tasks that would take more than 30 minutes and schedule it for the next day. Another important factor I noted during my improvement project’s second week is the need to have more consistent alarms and consider my start time and not just my end-of-shift times. That is because various nursing shifts may need more time, thus making it appropriate to adjust my hours accordingly. Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper
In the third week, I carried forward my second week’s strategy of writing down my tasks daily with their estimated time. After an evaluation, I found it necessary to add an alarm on my phone to keep me alert on when I was supposed to leave. As a result, my time improved, but still not at 40 hours though I saw a promising improvement in my hours. Another thing that I realized was the need to set my alarm daily during the week, so I did not need to reset it. In addition, when I realized that my hours were stacking up, I would leave a bit early to gain some work sanity and improve that balance.
I transferred all strategies from the third week but enhanced them by adding more alarms in the fourth week. The first alarm was meant for the estimated time to complete my tasks. The reason for such intervention is that it would give me a more proactive approach on whether I was taking too long or focusing too much on a task that would not meet the expected success, thus enabling me to complete more tasks on time. The other alarm was a 15-minute alarm to 4.15 pm, which I intended to use to help me assess the tasks that I would handle within 15 minutes to my official leaving time, followed by the 4.30 pm final alarm.
(Figure 4)

The strategy I took to ensure that every week started well was that each Friday, I would add a tool meant for the next week’s work efficiency with the overall goal of improving my 40-hours work schedule. When I assess the four-project weeks, I can feel the improvement of my work-life balance. I have been more present with my husband and my children because I am able to have that time with them. It has enabled me to join my family for dinner, especially in the last one and a half weeks as seen on Figure 4. In addition, not only did I increase my time with my family, but also have significantly increased my joy and love for my nurse manager position.  Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

Changes

Change is inevitable, so in the third and fourth weeks, I tried to ensure that I worked for less than 10 hours each day. Such adjustment did not only help me to interact with my family but also helped me tackle a lot of work within the limited times since I had time to relax, thus preventing instances of burnout. The only factor I struggled with during that time was ensuring task perfection to prevent revising the tasks, which sometimes takes more time than initial plans.

Improvement Project Reflection and Lessons

From the personal improvement project, I have learned the need to have a precise project aim before starting any project activity. Another lesson learned is that an improvement project does not happen immediately and that a gradual process is always involved, providing visible improvements.

Maintaining the Project’s Long-Term Improvement

Self-improvement projects help in making informed decisions that can impact long-term goals. Consistency is needed to sustain the improvement’s long-term goal (Stausmire & Ulrich, 2015). The changes I made are making a significant impact on my work-life balance. They are not difficult to maintain because I can use my phone for alarms, including writing my tasks each morning to improve my ability to function throughout the day and not waste time.  Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

Project Knowledge Within the Nursing Workplace

The experience gained from the project indicates that collaboration is a practical approach to providing an objective decision toward quality improvement projects. Hence, when carrying out any organization-level and unit-level changes, there will be a need to involve various stakeholders, especially those with expert knowledge about the needed change (Ricciardi & Shofer, 2019). That is evidenced through the input of my director since, without the help, it would be a bit hard for me to identify the essentiality of the root cause analysis. This section needs more discussion.  Be sure to discuss how you would apply lessons learned at the individual level to quality improvement at the unit and organization levels. This section also requires 4 references – 2 from outside sources within the past 5 years and 2 from the learning resources. Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

CONCLUSION

~ Additionally, all papers need a conclusion paragraph to wrap up the paper

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References

2 OUTSIDE SOURCES THAT ARE WITHIN LAST 5 YEARS

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2022). Process mapping. https://digital.ahrq.gov/health-it-tools-and-resources/evaluation-resources/workflow-assessment-health-it-toolkit/all-workflow-tools/process-0

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2019c). Measurement of patient safety. https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/measurement-patient-safety

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2019d). Root cause analysis. Retrieved from https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/root-cause-analysis

Johnson, J. K., & Sollecito, W. A. (2020). McLaughlin & Kaluzny’s continuous quality improvement in health care (5th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Ricciardi, R., & Shofer, M. (2019). Nurses and patients: Natural partners to advance patient safety. Journal of Nursing Care Qualit y, 34(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1097/NCQ.0000000000000377 Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper

Stausmire, J. M., & Ulrich, C. (2015). Making it meaningful: Finding quality improvement projects worthy of your time, effort, and expertise. Critical Care Nurse, 35(6), 57–61. https://www.aacn.org/docs/cemedia/C1563.pdf

Wolfe, H. A., Taylor, A., & Subramanyam, R. (2021). Statistics in quality improvement: Measurement and statistical process control. Pediatric Anesthesia, 31(5), 539-547.
https://doi.org/10.1111/pan.14163

Please see attached for detailed information. I have a table and a graph made for my 4 weeks of data collection. The items that are highlighted are what I did. I just need this paper written. It needs to be 4 pages without the data table and graph that I have already completed and attached. Thank you. Project Knowledge Within The Nursing Workplace Assignment Paper