Imbedding quality improvement into all aspects of nursing practice

Influencing nurses to accept and implement best practice and continuous quality improvement into everyday nursing activities and to change practice is a significant challenge for any nursing service. Quality improvement is often considered by clinicians to be yet another task to be added to their already busy workloads. This paper describes the attempts of one large metropolitan tertiary teaching hospital to imbed quality improvement and best practice across the spectrum of its nursing service and to foster a culture of quality within clinical practice and documentation. It outlines the methods used by one hospital to enshrine best practice into all nursing activities and to minimize variations in practice throughout the hospital through the use of its nursing clinical information system.