NHS4010 Assessment 3: Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal Essay

NHS4010 Assessment 3: Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal Essay

Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal

Medication errors are among adverse events that result in multiple health and economic ramifications, including deaths, disability, increased cost of care, and prolonged hospitalization. According to Escrivá Gracia et al. (2019), patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) are more susceptible to an average of 1.7 medical errors daily, increasing their exposure to life-threatening consequences. Human and organizational factors facilitate medication mistakes. In an interview with a registered nurse at Valley Regional Medical Center’s emergency department, the respondent identified time pressure, experience issues, unfamiliarity with medication management procedures, and ineffective team performance as the primary causes of medication mistakes at the organizational level. Escrivá Gracia et al. (2019) support these contentions by identifying low adherence to protocols, poor drug knowledge among professionals, absence of double checking, and flawed systems for detecting failures as contributing and causal factors for medication errors. Therefore, it is essential to note the organization should implement an interdisciplinary plan proposal to cultivate a safety culture and reduce the occurrence of medication errors. This paper elaborates on an interdisciplinary plan proposal for preventing errors by focusing on its objectives, questions and predictions, change theory and leadership strategies, and resources necessary for the plan’s success.

Objectives of the Interdisciplinary Plan

The primary purpose of the interdisciplinary plan proposal is to cultivate a culture of safety by sealing loopholes, including personal and organizational factors that facilitate medication errors. In this sense, the plan focuses on elements of organizational change, leadership strategies, and resources needed to promote the effective implementation of collaborative interventions for preventing and reducing medication mistakes.

Questions and Predictions

1. What is the role of an interdisciplinary team in preventing and reducing medication errors?

An interdisciplinary team consisting of physicians, nurses, informaticists, and medical assistants is responsible for implementing protocols for effective medication management to reduce medication errors. These interventions include incorporating evidence-based practice in managing medication errors, utilizing advanced technologies to prescribe, deliver, and administer medications, and collaborating in developing effective communication and reporting systems.

2. What are the potential constraints when implementing the interdisciplinary plan proposal?

The organization will encounter various challenges when implementing the interdisciplinary proposal to prevent and reduce medication errors. These constraints include system deficiencies, conflict of interest, inadequate resources, and employees’ unfamiliarity with the change process. Therefore, ensuring proper preparedness, effective change communication, and obtaining staff buy-in is essential to facilitate change implementation and sustenance.

3. How will the interdisciplinary team determine the effectiveness of the plan proposal?

The implementation team will conduct formative and summative evaluations to assess the plan’s effectiveness in reducing the occurrence of medication errors. Formative assessments will reveal the project’s progress and unanticipated barriers to the effective implementation of the interdisciplinary plan. According to Elwy et al. (2020), formative assessments can be developmental, process-focused, and pre-implementation evaluations. After these assessments, summative evaluations will determine if the plan is consistent with the strategic objectives and the overarching goal of preventing and reducing medication errors. The implementation team will apply findings from summative assessments to establish the need to redesign, replace, or duplicate the plan.

Change Theory and Leadership Strategies

The organization should incorporate change to challenge the status quo and address factors contributing to medication errors. In this sense, it is vital to use change management theory which provides guidelines for interdisciplinary collaboration and team performance. Kotter’s change theory emerges as a profound theoretical framework for communicating, implementing, and sustaining change when healthcare organizations endeavor to enact new quality improvement initiatives. Carman et al. (2019) contend that Kotter’s eight-step theory contains three profound tenets that summarize all other steps. These tenets are creating the climate for change, engaging and enabling the whole organization, and implementing and sustaining change.

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The first tenets entail cultivating a climate for change by establishing a sense of urgency, building guiding coalitions and partnerships, and developing a vision and strategy for achieving change (Carman et al., 2019). Secondly, the organization can engage employees to implement and assimilate change by communicating the change vision, generating short-term successes, and empowering them to embrace change elements. Finally, it is possible to implement and sustain change by anchoring new approaches in the organizational culture and producing more change.

This change theory is consistent with the interdisciplinary plan proposal for preventing and reducing medication errors because it emphasizes the need for creating a sense of urgency in addressing patient safety issues, obtaining staff buy-in, communicating change vision, empowering health stakeholders, and sustaining change by aligning the organizational culture with the new quality improvement approaches. As a result, it provides comprehensive and sequential steps for implementing new interventions and challenging restraining factors for change.

Although Kotter’s eight-step change theory can inform the change process consistent with the need to prevent and reduce medication mistakes, its effectiveness relies massively upon leadership strategies and styles. In this sense, it can improve change implementation, assimilation, and sustenance by incorporating transformational leadership strategies. According to Ree & Wiig (2019), transformational leadership cultivates a culture of critical and creative thinking by motivating employees to participate in decisions and processes, improving job demands, and reducing mental workload. Also, this leadership strategy enables leaders to recognize and reward employees, fosters trust among team members, enhances collaboration and cooperation between leaders and followers, and improves interpersonal relationships within organizations (Seljemo et al., 2020). As a result, it has emerged as the favorite leadership style for facilitating change and enabling the whole organization to sustain new approaches.

Strategies for Collaboration and Organizational Resources

An interdisciplinary team consisting of physicians, nurses, organizational leaders, medical assistants, informatics experts, and patients should collaborate to implement measures for preventing and reducing medication errors. The collaboration strategies for team members should be based on positive leadership, effective communication, knowledge enhancement through training, and cultivating a supportive team climate. According to Kholed et al. (2017), inter-professional teamwork should exhibit trust, respect, and mutual support. Trust entails positive working relationships, job satisfaction, and openness in sharing information. On the other hand, respect involves allowing team members to express ideas and opinions, understanding other professionals’ roles, and ensuring equality in team performance.

Similarly, the organization requires adequate resources to implement an interdisciplinary plan proposal for preventing medication errors. These resources include personnel and other-than-personnel expenses. Personnel expenditures will ensure effective implementation of staff-related improvement measures such as employee training, hiring additional informatics experts, and reimbursing the implementation team. Other-than-personnel expenses will include updating and installing automated dispensing cabinets, improving health information systems, monitoring and evaluating the provision of learning materials, and change sustenance.

Conclusion

Medication errors are inevitable yet preventable adverse events that result in multiple ramifications, including deaths, disability, increased care costs, prolonged hospitalization, and compromised quality of life. Therefore, implementing an interdisciplinary plan proposal alongside Kotter’s eight-step change theory, transformational leadership, and effective collaboration strategies can enable the organization to address contributing and causal factors for reducing the occurrence of medication mistakes. Further, the organization should allocate adequate resources to complement personnel and other-than-personnel expenses such as employee training, hiring additional informatics experts, installing advanced technologies like automated dispensing cabinets and computerized physician order entry (CPOE), and provision of learning and training materials.

References

Carman, A. L., Vanderpool, R. C., Stradtman, L. R., & Edmiston, E. A. (2019). A change-management approach to closing care gaps in a federally qualified health center: A rural Kentucky case study. Preventing Chronic Disease, 16(E105). https://doi.org/10.5888/pcd16.180589

Elwy, A., Wasan, A., Gillman, A., Johnston, K., Dodds, N., McFarland, C., & Greco, C. (2020). Using formative evaluation methods to improve clinical implementation efforts: Description and an example. Psychiatry Research, 283, 112532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2019.112532  

Escrivá Gracia, J., Brage Serrano, R., & Fernández Garrido, J. (2019). Medication errors and drug knowledge gaps among critical-care nurses: A mixed multi-method study. BMC Health Services Research, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-019-4481-7

Kholed, S. N. S., Hassan, N. M., Ma’on, S. N., & Hamid, N. Z. A. (2017). Teamwork and collaboration in healthcare: Elements of inter-professional teamwork. Advanced Science Letters, 23(11), 10834–10837. https://doi.org/10.1166/asl.2017.10164

Ree, E., & Wiig, S. (2019). Linking transformational leadership, patient safety culture, and work engagement in-home care services. Nursing Open, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.386

Seljemo, C., Viksveen, P., & Ree, E. (2020). The role of transformational leadership, job demands and job resources for patient safety culture in Norwegian nursing homes: A cross-sectional study. BMC Health Services Research, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05671-y

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For this assessment, you will create a 2-4 page plan proposal for an interprofessional team to collaborate and work toward driving improvements in the organizational issue you identified in the second assessment.

The health care industry is always striving to improve patient outcomes and attain organizational goals. Nurses can play a critical role in achieving these goals; one way to encourage nurse participation in larger organizational efforts is to create a shared vision and team goals (Mulvale et al., 2016). Participation in interdisciplinary teams can also offer nurses opportunities to share their expertise and leadership skills, fostering a sense of ownership and collegiality.

You are encouraged to complete the Budgeting for Nurses activity before you develop the plan proposal. The activity consists of seven questions that will allow you the opportunity to check your knowledge of budgeting basics and as well as the value of financial resource management. The information gained from completing this formative will promote success with the Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal. Completing this activity also demonstrates your engagement in the course, requires just a few minutes of your time, and is not graded.

Demonstration of Proficiency
Competency 1: Explain strategies for managing human and financial resources to promote organizational health.
Explain organizational resources, including a financial budget, needed for the plan to be a success and the impacts on those resources if nothing is done, related to the improvements sought by the plan.
Competency 2: Explain how interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to achieve desired patient and systems outcomes.
Describe an objective and predictions for an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to achieve a specific objective related to improving patient or organizational outcomes.
Explain the collaboration needed by an interdisciplinary team to improve the likelihood of achieving the plan’s objective. Include best practices of interdisciplinary collaboration from the literature.
Competency 4: Explain how change management theories and leadership strategies can enable interdisciplinary teams to achieve specific organizational goals.
Explain a change theory and a leadership strategy, supported by relevant evidence, that are most likely to help an interdisciplinary team succeed in collaborating and implementing, or creating buy-in for, the project plan.
Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly, evidence-based communication strategies to impact patient, interdisciplinary team, and systems outcomes.
Organize content so ideas flow logically with smooth transitions; contains few errors in grammar/punctuation, word choice, and spelling.
Apply APA formatting to in-text citations and references, exhibiting nearly flawless adherence to APA format.
Reference
Mulvale, G., Embrett, M., & Shaghayegh, D. R. (2016). \’Gearing up\’ to improve interprofessional collaboration in primary care: A systematic review and conceptual framework. BMC Family Practice, 17.

Professional Context
This assessment will allow you to describe a plan proposal that includes an analysis of best practices of interprofessional collaboration, change theory, leadership strategies, and organizational resources with a financial budget that can be used to solve the problem identified through the interview you conducted in the prior assessment.

Scenario
Having reviewed the information gleaned from your professional interview and identified the issue, you will determine and present an objective for an interdisciplinary intervention to address the issue.

Note: You will not be expected to implement the plan during this course. However, the plan should be evidence-based and realistic within the context of the issue and your interviewee\’s organization.

Instructions
For this assessment, use the context of the organization where you conducted your interview to develop a viable plan for an interdisciplinary team to address the issue you identified. Define a specific patient or organizational outcome or objective based on the information gathered in your interview.

The goal of this assessment is to clearly lay out the improvement objective for your planned interdisciplinary intervention of the issue you identified. Additionally, be sure to further build on the leadership, change, and collaboration research you completed in the previous assessment. Look for specific, real-world ways in which those strategies and best practices could be applied to encourage buy-in for the plan or facilitate the implementation of the plan for the best possible outcome.

Using the Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal Template [DOCX] will help you stay organized and concise. As you complete each section of the template, make sure you apply APA format to in-text citations for the evidence and best practices that inform your plan, as well as the reference list at the end.

Additionally, be sure that your plan addresses the following, which corresponds to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully so you understand what is needed for a distinguished score.

Describe an objective and predictions for an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to achieve a specific goal related to improving patient or organizational outcomes.
Explain a change theory and a leadership strategy, supported by relevant evidence, that is most likely to help an interdisciplinary team succeed in collaborating and implementing, or creating buy-in for, the project plan.
Explain the collaboration needed by an interdisciplinary team to improve the likelihood of achieving the plan’s objective. Include best practices of interdisciplinary collaboration from the literature.
Explain organizational resources, including a financial budget, needed for the plan to succeed and the impacts on those resources if the improvements described in the plan are not made.
Communicate the interdisciplinary plan, with writing that is clear, logically organized, and professional, with correct grammar and spelling, using current APA style.
Additional Requirements
Length of submission: Use the provided template. Remember that part of this assessment is to make the plan easy to understand and use, so it is critical that you are clear and concise. Most submissions will be 2 to 4 pages in length. Be sure to include a reference page at the end of the plan.
Number of references: Cite a minimum of 3 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that support your central ideas. Resources should be no more than 5 years old.
APA formatting: Make sure that in-text citations and reference list follow current APA style.
Note: Faculty may use the Writing Feedback Tool when grading this assessment. The Writing Feedback Tool is designed to provide you with guidance and resources to develop your writing based on five core skills. You will find writing feedback in the Scoring Guide for the assessment, once your work has been evaluated.

Portfolio Prompt: Remember to save the final assessment to your ePortfolio so that you may refer to it as you complete the final Capstone course.