W5-Collaboration and Teamwork

Post#1 by Sandra Barker-Collaboration and Teamwork

An effective team at my place of employment is the Falls Committee. The purpose of a Falls Committee is to facilitate a fall prevention program in order to decrease the risk of patient injury for all patient areas. These areas include ambulatory, hospital-based outpatient, and inpatient. Specific tasks of the team include monitoring trends of fall prevention processes, fall rates, evaluating appropriate equipment utilized to prevent falls, and assists in meeting accreditation requirements and metrics for the fall reduction program. The team frequently communicates and collaborates with other groups and appropriate committees, such as, the Nursing Clinical Practice Committee. The Nurse Clinical Practice Committee recommends improvement initiatives for fall prevention when necessary based on evidence-based practice, and evaluates clinical practice. Collaboration gives positive results because communication can be fulfilling and more cost effective in the long run (Northouse, 2018).

Due to a significant number of slips, trip, and falls occurring in common areas of hospitals such as, lobbies, waiting rooms, stairwells, sidewalks, and parking garages, this can all lead to legal action. Hospital leaders work on creating projects in order to prevent these costly events. Many times falls that occur in parking garages are from people tripping over the concrete car stops at each parking space. Fortunately depending on the building code of the location, car stops can be removed to eliminate this tripping hazard (Hakvoort, Dikken, van der Wel, Derks & Schuurmans, 2021). Becoming a member of the Falls Committee is an important part of any nurse’s role. This is also significant to nurses’ job satisfaction and autonomy to have an opportunity of involvement and input in which to actively solve problems and maintain autonomy over nursing care (Huber, 2018). I can remember working on a medical surgical unit where falls were an everyday occurrence. Even when a patient was put on fall precautions, there were still many falls happening on this unit. Many times these falls would occur when the nurse was in another patient room. The bed alarm would alarm, but due to issues of short staffing the patient would fall before staff could arrive. This was a vicious cycle that I felt guilty about, so I joined the committee in hopes of making a difference.

The membership will be at least a two-year term. The Fall Prevention Committee meets every first Wednesday of the month for approximately 1.5 hours. The committee consists of doctors, nurses, and nurse technicians. The distribution of minutes goes to the Nursing Clinical Practice Committee, the Hospital Practice Committee, and the Nursing Quality Council. Nurse leaders focus on advocating for enhanced communication that focuses on streamlining communication practices, such as huddles, staff meetings, and documentation/reporting systems that are compatible with essential electronic date management systems (Huber, 2018). A great example of this is during daily multidisciplinary rounds nursing leadership encourages communication between health professionals from different professions speaking of any fall or injuries that may have occurred on the unit and making a plan to prevent anymore from happening.

References

Hakvoort, L., Dikken, J., van der Wel, M., Derks, C., & Schuurmans, M. (2021).

Minimizing the knowledge-to-action gap; identification of interventions to change

nurses’ behavior regarding fall prevention, a mixed method study. BMC Nursing, 20(1),

1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-021-00598-z

Huber, D.L. (2018). Leadership and nursing care management (6th ed.). Saunders/ Elsevier

Publishers, Inc.

Northouse, P.G. (2018). Introduction to leadership: Concepts and practice (4th ed.). Sage

Publications, Inc.