Assuring Quality and Patient Safety - A Nursing Quality Care-Metrics Implementation and Governance Plan for Older Person Services

This paper sets out an implementation and governance plan for the introduction of a Quality Care Metrics system into an Older Person Service. Increasing focus on healthcare failures to deliver safe quality care to service users requires healthcare leaders to assure the public, the regulators and the commissioning agents is driving organisational development programmes.

Nursing Quality Care Metrics allow nurses to systematically measure the quality of the care they deliver and can be used by senior nurse managers to evaluate the nursing structure, processes and outcomes of care thereby strengthening their accountability and their negotiating power at the board table.

The HSE Organisational Development model is used to assess the current situation and create a plan to oversee the successful implementation of the project in a public residential facility for Older Person Services and Stufflebeam’s Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) will formatively and summatively evaluate the project from initiation through to mainstreaming stages. The importance of setting up of governance systems to oversee performance as well as the requirement to examine metrics data in the context of leadership ability, workplace culture and other quality indicators is acknowledged.

Choice of nursing metrics used to measure quality of care should reflect interests of nursing team and recipients of care and should be evidence based and embedded in quality standards to assure professional and service accountability.