Improving efficiency within a trauma nurse practitioner team

Clinicians, including nurse practitioners (NPs), face a number of challenges in delivering high-quality care including frequent interruptions that can potentially compromise patient safety and job satisfaction.

Trauma NPs voiced frustration with their efforts to provide efficient, high-quality care with frequent interruptions, most commonly pager alerts. The purpose of this quality improvement (QI) initiative was to increase trauma NPs' perceptions of patient safety and improve NPs' job satisfaction by reducing workflow interruptions.

The Model for Improvement guided this initiative.

The aims of this initiative were to reduce the percentage of nonurgent workflow interruptions via pager alerts by 20% and to increase the utilization of a standardized trauma NP patient rounding process from 0% to 50%.

Use of the standardized rounding process improved from 0% to 87%. Interruptions via pager alerts decreased by 36.2%. All nine (100%) trauma NP survey responses revealed an improvement in NP perception of patient safety and job satisfaction.

The QI initiative found that increasing communication during rounds by using a standardized rounding process involving the bedside registered nurse can minimize interruptions and improve the efficiency of a trauma NP team. The key to the success of the QI initiative was the implementation of a standardized rounding process.