Empowering Nurses to Engage With Transplant Quality Data and Outcomes

Understanding patient outcome data and quality improvement metrics can help the health-care team target interventions to improve patient care and guide practice. Challenges to understanding and use of data include finding time during clinical work, determining meaning, and understanding a connection to practice.

Acute care nurses who routinely care for organ transplant patients could not speak to transplant quality data or outcomes. This was evidenced by 81% accuracy in interpreting transplant quality data.

The setting was an inpatient/acute care organ transplant and progressive care unit. A survey was employed to staff; the lowest scoring areas were training to accurately interpret and having time to understand transplant quality data and outcomes. A multimodal intervention that included an education session at a mandatory staff education event followed by routine posting quality data on the unit was devised. Goals were to improve the accuracy of transplant quality data interpretation to an average of 90% and the average key confidence indicators to 6.0 (out of 7.0).

Education was created to cover background and initial results, data interpretation, and clinical significance. A display board in the staff lounge was dedicated to transplant quality data.

All goals were met. Accurate interpretation improved to 90% and average key confidence indicators increased to 6.54.

An interdisciplinary team process that involved stakeholders was essential to success. A similar method could be employed with nurses and other frontline staff.