1. Competency: With advances in technology and more complex responsibilities amongst staff, the area of competency assessment and reassessment holds a lot of opportunity for improvement. Many organizations struggle with differentiating orientation and competency at the point of hire along with determining which competency assessment should occur on an annual basis.
2. Suicide Risk Identification and Management: In order to meet the current requirements, organizations must select an evidence-based guideline to implement within their organization. Unfortunately, many organizations will select the guideline but then choose to alter the screening or assessment tool or not fully implement the guideline. Once the evidence-based guideline is altered, the projected outcomes of the guideline are eroded and will not be achieved.
3. Infection Prevention: Removing Covid from the equation, organizations were already struggling with properly implementing Infection Prevention strategies. Inconsistent donning and doffing techniques place staff and patients at risk for spread of infection. Couple poor donning/doffing techniques with poor habits such as not removing Personal Protective Equipment such as gowns after exiting a potentially infectious environment and poor hand-hygiene techniques and you have the perfect recipe for a problem.
4. Care-Planning/ Treatment Planning: Care Plans and Treatment plans remain a problematic area. These plans require the following elements that organizations consistently struggle with: (1) Plan goals must be measurable (2) Goals must be patient specific (3) Goals must be time oriented and (4) Goals must reflect the patients’ goals.
5. Medication Management: Findings in this area range from expired medications, unsecured medications, sample medications with control processes in place, poorly written orders that place patients at risk such as ambiguous pain management orders, duplicate medication orders and infusion orders that do not contain sufficient information for staff to safely administer the medication without taking on additional risk.
The consulting team at C&A is well versed in best practices and can provide guidance and support to your organization to facilitate success. Contact us at info@courtemanche-assocs.com for more information on how we can help.