Communicating with legislators to influence health policy Essay

• AACN Essentials of Baccalaureate Education: pp. 13–15 Source: < http://www.aacn.nche.edu/education-resources/BaccEssentials08.pdf > [11/29/2016] This crucial document by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) explains essential areas for knowledge of the BSN nurse. Essential II: Basic Organizational and Systems Leadership for Quality Care and Patient Safety Rationale Organizational and systems leadership, quality improvement, and safety are critical to promoting high quality patient care. Leadership skills are needed that emphasize ethical and critical decisionmaking, initiating and maintaining effective working relationships, using mutually respectful communication and collaboration within interprofessional teams, care coordination, delegation, and developing conflict resolution strategies. Basic nursing leadership includes an awareness of complex systems, and the impact of power, politics, policy, and regulatory guidelines on these systems. To be effective, baccalaureate graduates must be able to practice at the microsystem level within an everchanging healthcare system. This practice requires creativity and effective leadership and communication skills to work productively within interprofessional teams in various healthcare settings. As a member of a healthcare team, baccalaureate graduates will understand and use quality improvement concepts, processes, and outcome measures. In addition, graduates will be able to assist or initiate basic quality and safety investigations; assist in the development of quality improvement action plans; and assist in monitoring the results of these action plans within the clinical microsystem, which is embedded within a larger system of care. An important component of quality is safety. Safety in health care is defined as the minimization of “risk of harm to patients and providers through both system effectiveness and individual performance” (Cronenwett et al., 2007). Research has demonstrated that nurses more than any other healthcare professional are able to recognize, interrupt, evaluate, and correct healthcare errors (Rothschild et al., 2006) The baccalaureate graduate implements safety principles and works with others on the interprofessional healthcare team to create a safe, caring environment for care delivery. Baccalaureate graduates will be skilled in working within organizational and community arenas and in the actual provision of care by themselves and/or supervising care provided by other licensed and nonlicensed assistive personnel. They will be able to recognize safety and quality concerns and apply evidencebased knowledge from the nursing profession and other clinical sciences to their practice. Baccalaureate nursing graduates are distinguished by their abilities to identify, assess, and evaluate practice in care delivery models that are based in contemporary nursing science and are feasible within current cultural, economic, organizational, and political perspectives. The baccalaureate program prepares the graduate to: 1. Apply leadership concepts, skills, and decision making in the provision of high quality nursing care, healthcare team coordination, and the oversight and accountability for care delivery in a variety of settings. 2. Demonstrate leadership and communication skills to effectively implement patient safety and quality improvement initiatives within the context of the interprofessional team. 3. Demonstrate an awareness of complex organizational systems. 4. Demonstrate a basic understanding of organizational structure, mission, vision, philosophy, and values. 5. Participate in quality and patient safety initiatives, recognizing that these are complex system issues, which involve individuals, families, groups, communities, populations, and other members of the healthcare team. 6. Apply concepts of quality and safety using structure, process, and outcome measures to identify clinical questions and describe the process of changing current practice. 7. Promote factors that create a culture of safety and caring. 8. Promote achievement of safe and quality outcomes of care for diverse populations. 9. Apply quality improvement processes to effectively implement patient safety initiatives and monitor performance measures, including nursesensitive indicators in the microsystem of care. 10. Use improvement methods, based on data from the outcomes of care processes, to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality and safety of health care. 11. Employ principles of quality improvement, healthcare policy, and costeffectiveness to assist in the development and initiation of effective plans for the microsystem and/or systemwide practice improvements that will improve the quality of healthcare delivery. 12. Participate in the development and implementation of imaginative and creative strategies to enable systems to change. Sample Content · leadership, including theory, behaviors, characteristics, contemporary approaches, leadership development, and styles of leadership 15 · leadership skills and strategies (negotiating, collaborating, coordinating); decision making to promote quality patient care in a variety of healthcare settings · change theory and complexity science · community organizing models · social change theories · creative and imaginative strategies in problem solving · communication, including elements, channels, levels, barriers, models, organizational communication, skill development, workplace communication, conflict resolution, optimizing patient care outcomes, and chainofcommand · principles of interpersonal interactions/communication · healthcare systems (structure and finance) and organizational structures and relationships (e.g., between finance, organizational structure, and delivery of care, particularly at the microsystem level, including mission/vision/philosophy and values) · reliability and reliability sciences in health care · operations research, queuing theory, and systems designs in health care · teamwork skills, including effective teams/characteristics, application to patient care teams, team process, conflict resolution, delegation, supervision, and collaboration · microsystems and their relationship to complex systems, quality care, and patient safety · patient safety principles, including safety standards, organizational safety processes, reporting processes, departmental responsibilities, ownership, national initiatives, and financial implications · quality improvement (QI), including history, elements, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) models, concepts, principles, benchmarking, processes, tools, departmental ownership, roles/responsibility, methodologies, regulatory requirements, organizational structures for QI, outcomes, monitoring, Quality Assurance (QA) vs. QI, beginning resource need assessment, and resource identification, acquisition, and evaluation · overview of QI process techniques, including benchmarks, basic statistics, root cause analyses, and Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) in the quality improvement process · principles of nursing care delivery management and evaluation …