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Victoria Lyons posted

Evaluation Plan

The Change Theory I am going to use is Roger’s Five Stage Change Theory. Stage 1 educating reasons for the change, how and who will be involved in the change (DePew & Kummeth, 2011). This would involve educating all staff involved on why reducing stroke admissions is important. Many people may not know that stroke patients that are readmitted within 30 days have a 2.5 times higher mortality rate than other readmissions (Poston, 2018). All healthcare workers that are involved with stroke patient care will be involved in the change. This includes nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, physicians, dietary, and social workers. A transitional care model will be implemented to make transition for patients from one healthcare setting to either home or a rehabilitation center (Poston, 2018).

Stage 2 involves encouraging the employees to accept the change (DePew & Kummeth, 2011). Due to healthcare workers being historically resistance to change, it may be hard to encourage workers to change. Presenting these workers with a presentation to explain why it is important and attempt to get them excited over benefiting the patient’s well-being.

Stage 3 decides if the change should be adopted by data analyzation then implementing the change by a potential pilot study (DePew & Kummeth, 2011). This could involve potentially picking every so many patients and trialing their hospital stay and discharge needs using a transitional care model. TRACS, COMPASS, and MISTT are examples of transitional care models (Poston, 2018). Over a certain time period the patient’s that were picked for the care model trial would be compared to patient’s that were not chosen. This would evaluate if the care models work.

Stage 4 will implement the change while the organization is evolving to accommodate the change (DePew & Kummeth, 2011). Since in the previous step healthcare workers have already started using the system with certain patients over this time the change will be rolled out to include all stroke patients.

Stage 5 is a confirmation that the healthcare workers involved adopted the change (DePew & Kummeth, 2011). At this point evaluation of the how the healthcare workers are doing with implementation of the program would be important so continued education can occur.

Benchmarks to evaluate the change

The obvious benchmark that would be measured would be if stroke patient readmissions decreased within a 30-day period from when the changes were implemented. This is the crucial time to prevent increased mortality for stroke patients (Poston, 2018).

Processes to receive feedback

Receiving feedback from patients and families would involve interviewing them during follow up appointments to see what has worked for them and what hasn’t. Surveys could be sent to their home for evaluation. The healthcare providers should be attending a monthly meeting to provide feedback to leaders of the project and to keep them feeling like they are involved in any changes that could better the process. Keeping employees interested in projects requires their involvement to stay excited about it which will make them want to do the best they can to reduce stroke readmissions.

References

DePew, D., & Kummeth, P. (2011). npdsamplechapter.pdf. Retrieved from Nursing World: Nursing Professional Development Review and Resource Manual, 4th Edition

Poston, K. (2018). Reducing readmissions in stroke patients. American Nurse Today, 9-15.