NHS FPX 6004 Assessment 1 Dashboard Metrics, Benchmarks, and Policy Decisions

NHS FPX 6004 Assessment 1

Dashboard Metrics, Benchmarks, and Policy Decisions

Student name

Capella University

NHS-FPX6004 – Healthcare Law and Policy

Professor Name

Submission Date

Dashboard Metrics, Benchmarks, and Policy Decisions

To quantify the performance of healthcare organizations, one has to understand how dashboard measures, performance targets, and policy interventions influence each other. Infection control is considered a key performance indicator against which the assessment is conducted. It discusses how the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding infection control among the healthcare personnel influence the practices of infection prevention, and how the Nursing Practice Act regulates the duties of nurses, especially in infection prevention (CDC, 2024). This assists in securing the patients and also makes the whole healthcare system more efficient.

Policy Analysis: Compliance and Divergence from Relevant Healthcare Law

The nursing practice act is consistent with the CDC guidelines for infection control of healthcare workers. Both of them promote some of the most essential infection prevention measures like good hand hygiene and the use of the relevant personal protection equipment (PPE) to safeguard patients and medical professionals (CDC, 2024). Although these standards are reflected in the law of the Nursing Practice Act, the CDC recommendations advocate the same purposes of enhanced infection reporting and surveillance as an additional measure of patient protection (Boehning & Haddad, 2023). They both adhere to one another in order to enhance patient safety.

Although the two are similar, there are significant differences between them. The Nursing Practice Act is a statutory document that includes certain definitions of the role, duties, and responsibility of nurses, as well as their accountability. Where CDC offers evidence-based guidelines to all healthcare workers that are not legally binding until the state laws and organizational rules adopt them (Kulis et al., 2022). Lack of conformity to the act would lead to disciplinary or legal measures, so it is necessary that the provisions of the act are adhered to by licensed nursing practitioners.

Benchmark Related to Healthcare Policy and Law

The CDC infection prevention guidelines for the healthcare staff offer the most optimal practices to minimize healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs). One of the important indicators of such efforts has been the standardized infection ratio (SIR), which is the ratio of the number of observed infections in a facility to the number of predicted infections adjusted by patient population factors and facility-specific factors (Buetti, 2022). The SIR lower than 1.0 shows a higher-than-desired outcome in the prevention of infection.

These recommendations provided by the CDC are directly connected to the performance on SIR benchmark as they present evidence-based practices, e.g., regular hand hygiene, proper use of gloves and PPE, and sterile procedure when inserting central lines (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2021). By comparing the outcomes and the national SIR targets, as well as the congruency between the practices and the outcomes of the infection, healthcare organizations could identify the gaps in performance. The achievement of an organization to this threshold is an indicator of well-designed infection prevention practices and a safety culture, positively impacting the quality of patient care and contributing to the improvement of the financial burden of HAIs in the healthcare system.

Consequences of Benchmark Underperformance

The healthcare organizations can be greatly influenced by the failure to meet the national standard of the standardized infection ratio of central line-associated bloodstream infections. The higher SIR, the more patients suffer, spend more time in the hospital, and healthcare costs more to control infections because an institution has more CLABSIs than it would be predicted based on national standards (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2021). In addition to undermining patient safety, these performance gaps not only lower the image of an organization but also decrease the number of patients joining an organization as a result of people losing trust. Furthermore, such consequences affect the morale of the staff personnel negatively, as the nurses are left to struggle with the load and pressure of dealing with avoidable infections. In its turn, it leads to the need to enhance compliance with the infection control practices by investing additional training and resources (Schmaltz et al., 2024). Prevention of CLABSI is thus a priority in the culture of clinical excellence, patient safety, and quality of care.

• Underlying Assumptions

The use of the SIR benchmark of CLABSIs has several assumptions. It assumes that healthcare entities are proactive and eager to reduce the number of infections by collaborative efforts and ensure that best practice is supported by evidence. It also assumes that it should have a proper education, equipment, and leadership buy-in to maintain effective infection prevention strategies. The presence of nationally consistent data to compare is also likely to introduce much knowledge that will be utilized to further enhance the quality of healthcare.

Evaluating Benchmark Underperformance for Quality Improvement

The Methodist Specialty Transplant Hospital can improve its performance by working on its current weakness of failure to meet the national standard of central line-associated bloodstream infections, as expressed as the standardized infection ratio. This ratio is used to compare the number of observed CLABSI infections to an expected number of infections (adjusted based on patient demographics and facility-specific factors that increase risk) (CDC, 2022). An SIR value above 1.0 indicates that the number of infections exceeds the expected amount it hence, additional infection protection is required. The SIR of the hospital is 1,2, which is greater than 1,0, which is the national standardized infection ratio (The Leapfrog Group, 2024). This implies that an urgent need exists for some interventional measures.

Failure to accomplish this objective can be disastrous to patient safety and organizational performance. The high rates of CLABSI lead to more complications, longer stays in hospitals, and higher costs of treatment that can put a strain on healthcare resources and demoralize staff. Subsequent infections only deteriorate the hospital’s image among the population, decrease the level of trust in it, and slow down the flow of patients (Schmaltz et al., 2024). However, one can claim that with the enhancement of compliance with infection control guidelines and CLABSI mitigation, one will be able to substantially improve the quality of care and guarantee improved clinical outcomes and promote a safer and more conducive environment not only to the patients but also to the healthcare professionals.

Advocacy for Ethical and Sustainable Solutions to Benchmark Underperformance

The strategies that healthcare organizations ought to adopt in order to address underperformance in terms of infection control measures are ethical obligation, sustainable approaches, and stakeholder partnerships. These strategies must rest upon the principles of beneficence and justice and are supposed to be focused on the maximum amount of patient outcomes and equitable access to high-quality care (Tan et al., 2023). Infection control is a part of the responsibility and safety culture in the organization that can be implemented by investing in the extensive training of employees and providing them with the corresponding materials. These initiatives also serve long-term sustainability goals by encouraging practices that result in both short-term and long-term cost reductions, and those also result in improved long-term patient health.

Engaging the stakeholders, including the hospital leaders, clinical professionals, and policymakers, in the collaborative decision-making process will facilitate ownership and commitment to these improvement initiatives. As an illustration, the process of developing infection prevention practices that will be more practical, effective, and sustainable should include nursing and frontline health workers (Gagnon et al., 2024). Teamwork results in trust, openness, and team empowerment. By integrating the environmental and resource-based dimensions of sustainability as well, the organizations are able to come up with dynamic systems that are capable of withstanding and adapting to the prevailing and emerging challenges. Finally, the emphasis on ethical and sustainable improvement efforts can facilitate the process of achieving such standards as the CLABSI SIR, and can also lead to patient safety and population well-being.

Conclusion

Discussing the benchmark underperformance in infection control in the form of CLABSI rates requires all stakeholders of the healthcare organization to unite. The practice of ethical behavior founded on the principles of beneficence and justice is promoted and is even more likely to achieve sustainability and become quite feasible in terms of patient safety and quality care because of shared decision-making. This will result in effective actions through the recruitment of healthcare staff in order to bring about a culture of responsibility and trust that will translate to improved outcomes. The outcomes do not just create comparative excellence in relation to important benchmarks but also system resilience in the long run to rise up to the occasion.

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