Root Cause Analysis

NURS 2950 – Scholarly Paper

Root Cause Analysis Paper – Part 1: Identify the Problem you want to analyze (2 points).

The focus of the scholarly paper is root cause analysis, or RCA. You will identify a problem relevant to nursing practice, patient care, or the healthcare environment. Complete this worksheet and submit to the associated folder for Part 1 of the assignment. See the course calendar or assignment folder for the due date.

1. Briefly identify the nature of the problem you are planning to discuss.

· This paper will focus on a common nosocomial bacterial infection most prevalent in medical and surgical ICU. Pneumonia is a hospital-acquired infection that significantly adds to the cost of medical care and the length of hospital stays. This disease can be contracted by a patient in a hospital at least 48-72 hours after being admitted. It occurs by aspiration of bacteria colonizing the oropharynx or upper GI of the patient. This type of infection tends to be more severe than other lung infections because people in the hospital are often very sick, therefore, are less able to fight off germs.

2. List the people involved in the issue.

· The people involved are the nurse, a 60-year-old female patient, and her son.

3. Describe the details of the situation you will be analyzing. Be specific, and supply as much detail as you can to help in determining the feasibility of the topic for the assignment.

· A report from CDC shows that close to 2 million Americans get hospital infection and about 900,000 of them dies. Hospital-acquired infections are those nosocomially acquired infections that the patient did not initially have during admission. After nosocomial infections have infected a person, they show fever, headache, cough, pain when urinating, and discharge from the wound. Although not everybody admitted to the hospital gets these infections, people with a compromised immune system are at higher risks. 

My research would involve analyzing infection-related events as sentinel events using a case study where the patient was admitted to the hospital and later discovered with pneumonia three days after discharge. The task is to perform root cause analysis on the events and suggest actions that would prevent the occurrence of the problem.

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