With the rise in patient workload and expectations for nurses, having a comprehensive acuity solution is the best practice for developing nursing budgets and managing real-time staffing.
Utilizing a Nursing Process-Driven Acuity Solution
Various solutions on the market can determine an acuity for a patient based on different tasks, such as how many medications were given, or how many times a patient needed assistance to get to the bedside commode. However, this relies heavily on real-time documentation as well as the tedious charting of everything done for a patient.
A solution that is laser-focused on the nursing profession is a better way to manage patient care, which includes the true needs of a patient and family. For example, think of the nursing process around managing behavior or emotional needs of a patient. Our solution understands that a patient may need that comforting hand or time with the nurse after a devastating diagnosis. It accounts for this workload by importing the documentation that occurs and can reflect that patient-specific acuity for that time period.
Measuring Total Nursing Workload
When staffing, managing an entire department with the ebb and flow of patients being admitted, discharged, taken for procedures, and even education needs, how does an acuity solution account for that work? The simple answer is by being a comprehensive solution that accounts for total nursing workload. This could be the time needed to settle a patient in after an admission; a solution that captures the process of a critical care nurse needing to go with their patient to CT and being off the unit for a period of time.
When looking for solutions for acuity, simply having a score for a single patient—or even a score for every patient—does not tell the whole story of what is truly happening in the whole department. In order to truly operationalize the acuity, a solution must include all related activities to the department, including non-patient specific activities. This may be a critical care nurse being responsible for responding to code events throughout the hospital, a chemotherapy certified staff nurse needing to start critical medications away from their home unit, or even a labor and delivery (L&D) nurse having to go into critical care to manage fetal heart tones in a critically ill mother. The complete picture is much more than just a single patient’s acuity for a period of time. It’s about everything nursing is expected to do, manage, and complete during a shift.
Implementing an Acuity Solution at Your Hospital
AcuityPlus can help you with this. Connect with us to understand how a comprehensive solution can make a world of difference for your nursing staff.
Blog by: Walker Schlundt, BSN RN
The Benefits of an Acuity-Driven Nursing Workload Solution:
- Part One: Measuring Comprehensive Acuity – Read Now
- Part Two: Nursing Process Focused – Read Now
- Part Three: Objective Tool for Equitable Assignments – Read Now
- Part Four: Standardized and Validated Tool to Measure, Compare, and Benchmark Patient Acuity – Read Now
