NURS 3110 Week 5 Assignment 2 – Quantitative Analysis of Patient Safety Incidents

NURS 3110 Week 5 Assignment 2 – Quantitative Analysis of Patient Safety Incidents

I frequently perform data analysis as the one in this Assignment in my current position when I am completing our monthly Quality Assurance Performance Improvement audits and meeting minutes which include plans of correction as needed. In analyzing this data, the first thing that pops out to me is the surprisingly lower average age of patients. I would expect the average age to be over 60 or 65 years of age. The next thing I noticed is that falls are the patient safety event with the highest % out of the reported events. My question would be, what are the national averages for these events? I would need the national averages to determine which patient safety event needs to be addressed the most aggressively. With falls having the highest number of occurrences in this sampling, I would also like to know the mental status of each patient that had a fall.

I sorted the data by unit to see if one unit had a significantly higher number of events than the other. Unit 1 had 23 events, and Unit 2 had 27 events. I would not call this a trend. I next sorted the data by diagnosis. The patients with the primary diagnosis of pneumonia had the most safety events at 17, 9 of the events being falls. This is a trend that would need further investigation. Patients with the primary diagnosis of diabetes had the second-highest number of patient safety events coming in at 14. Of the 14 events, half were medication errors. I would like to know how many of these medication errors were from the administration of insulin.

The next important trend to look for is to see if there is a trend with staff. Do all the falls occur with a particular nurse’s patient? Is the tech or aide the same for the majority of the falls? We would also want to look at shifts. Do more events occur on the night shift or day shift? I would also like to know the location or source of the MRSA events. For example, are all the MRSA infections found in central lines, or is there no trend between the location or source of the MRSA? The last bit of data that stuck out to me was that three patients that had falls also had CAUTIs. These three patients were also all in Unit 1. There is no connection between these three patients and their primary diagnosis.

NURS 3110 Week 5 Assignment 2 – Quantitative Analysis of Patient Safety Incidents

As you can see, there is a significant amount of data that can be analyzed when developing a plan of correction to decrease these events. Performing a thorough root cause analysis is critical to developing a plan that addresses the specific calls. Interventions must be appropriate. For example, it would not be appropriate to just say, “will educate patients on the use of call lights” to decrease falls if the majority of the patients falling do not have the cognitive ability to remember to use a call light.

Reference

Gray, J. R, Grove, S. K., & Sutherland, S. (2017). The practice of nursing research: Appraisal, synthesis, and generation of evidence (8th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

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NURS 3110 Week 5 Assignment 2 – Quantitative Analysis of Patient Safety Incidents

This is the form you need to use to describe the findings (or results) of your quantitative analyses of the patient safety data set. For each finding, you are given specific instructions on how to use the Excel program to analyze the data that will give you the results you need for this Assignment. When you have completed the analyses and described your findings on this form, you then need to submit it using the Week 5 platform for assignments.