Supply Shortage Effect on Patients Length of Stay

SUPPLY SHORTAGE EFFECT ON PATIENTS LOSAbstractThe job of a nurse is to provide quality care to their patients. Implementing successful patient care includes more than the physical skills provided by the nurse. Instead, it also consists of ensuring that the hospital is prepared in the sense of having all of the resources needed readily available, making sure the rooms are properly cleaned and reset to take new admissions, and making sure that the managers and administration do proper staffing and nurse to patient ratios. A lack in one of these areas can greatly impact the quality of the care given to the patients. Like an assembly line, when one factor stops working, the others are affected and have to work harder to pick up the slack; thus, resulting in burnout and decreased quality of the output. One resource that stands out when it is lacking, is supplies. The supply rooms and patient rooms not being adequately restocked and reset at the beginning and end of each shift results in an increased delay in care and length of stay. The purpose of this project is to explore and measure interventions that allow for the proper restocking of supply rooms and resetting of patient rooms and how it affects the timing of the patient’s care and length of stay. The evidence found for the need included the policies for quality improvement, how to navigate supply demands and communicate with the company, what factors can reduce a delay in patient care, the effects of a nurse-to-patient ratio on a patients length of stay, and how palliative care can decrease a patient’s length of stay. The methods I will use include making sure that the hospital is following the quality improvement policies, the supply closets are adequately restocked, and the patient rooms are properly reset at the beginning and end of each shift. I will evaluate my methods by comparing the new average length of stay to the previous average length of stay after the interventions have been implemented for at least one month.