[Quality assurance in nursing in acute care using a Swedish modified version of the Rush-Medicus instrument]

The aim of the article is to describe experiences from a project on quality assurance of nursing care in a county hospital. Assessment and improvement of the quality of care were mainly based on an earlier developed modified Swedish version of the Rush Medicus Nursing Process Quality Monitoring Instrument (RMI-MSV). Two hundred and forty patients and 57 registered nurses (RNs) representing surgical, medical and orthopaedic care units participated in the study, which was divided into two quality assessment occasions. An experiment-control design was used with intervention to the experiment units after the first quality assessment occasion. All the E-units improved their quality levels in almost all main areas in the second assessment occasion. The E-units together in relation to the C-units together obtained statistically significant improvements (p < 0.05) in the main area concerning documentation (E-units minus C-units occasion 2 minus occasion 1). The overall experience is that the RMI-MSV can be used for quality assurance of nursing care in a Swedish acute hospital, but needs to be further refined.