Development of a Quality Indicator to Measure Urgent Requests to the Bedside.
- Resource Type
- Academic Journal
- Authors
- Dyess-Nugent P; Bouzid J; Roberson A; Quint-Bouzid M; Nelson DB
- Source
- Publisher: New York Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101304602 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1751-486X (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 17514851 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Nurs Womens Health
- Subject
- Language
- English
Objective: To develop a quality indicator describing the response time to an urgent request for a physician to the bedside of a pregnant or postpartum woman and to identify opportunities for improvement in care timeliness for women with worsening serious clinical conditions.
Design: Evidence-based quality improvement project using the Iowa Model-Revised framework to develop a maternal care quality indicator.
Setting: Labor and delivery, antepartum, and mother/baby units in a large urban safety-net hospital preparing for a state level of maternal care designation survey.
Participants: All nurses and physicians caring for hospitalized pregnant and postpartum women participated in implementation.
Intervention/measurements: Physician response time was measured as the elapsed time from a nurse's urgent request for a physician and the presence of a physician at the bedside of a woman in one of the identified units, as recorded in the electronic health record.
Results: Physician response time to an urgent request to the bedside was documented 179 times during the first 3 months after implementation. Physician presence at the bedside within 30 minutes of a request was recorded in more than 99% of these events.
Conclusion: Physicians' responses to early warning signs within our facility were timely and within the parameters established by the Texas state-mandated criteria for a Level IV maternal care hospital. Response time as documented in the electronic health record provides an important quality indicator of maternal care in the inpatient setting.
(Copyright © 2020 AWHONN. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)