NUR 590 Benchmark – Evidence-Based Practice Project Proposal Organizational Culture and Readiness

Sample Answer

Implementing change in healthcare organizations using evidence-based practice proposals requires an organizational culture that is change-focused and embraces lifelong learning for nurses and other healthcare providers. Readiness for change implies that an organization is willing and ready to accept innovative and novel approaches to care delivery, especially in reducing nosocomial infections among older adult inpatients (Harrison et al., 2021).

The essence of this paper is to evaluate the organizational culture and readiness, care processes to enhance outcomes, facilitate readiness, and determine the different stakeholders required to implement the EBP project and their roles. In its final part, the paper explains information technologies required by organizations to implement change.

Organizational Culture and Readiness For Change

Organizational culture entails assumptions, belief systems, values, and norms that regulate interactions and individual behaviors among internal and even external stakeholders. These values and shared beliefs impact people’s behavior and their performance (Parreira et al., 2021).

As such, the facility has a unique organizational culture based on its values, philosophy, vision, and mission. The mission of the organization is a commitment to quality care delivery in the best way possible. The organization’s vision is to be a leading care provider with a commitment to meeting patient needs based on their situation and diversity. The core values include empathy, integrity, dedication, and service.

The organization’s culture supports change as it encourages nurses to implement best practices, integrate evidence, and empower patients to make better decisions through deliberate and purposeful engagement. The leaders have an open-door policy and believe in the generation of novel ideas to improve patient care.

The organization also has a strong inter-professional collaboration team with a positive perception from the employees (Harrison et al., 2021). The employees in the facility are willing to advance their education, skills, and professional development to attain the best levels and specialize to enhance patient access to care.

Level of Readiness and Readiness Tool

Learning organizations embrace innovative and novel approaches to care delivery. Change implementers leverage readiness tools to evaluate the level of readiness for an organization to implement new processes and procedures aimed at enhancing care delivery.

In this case, the organizational readiness to change assessment (ORCA) is a tool used to evaluate the readiness of the facility to implement EBP interventions to reduce hospital-associated infections (HAIs) (Kononowech et al., 2021). The readiness tool comprises three primary levels evidence, context, and facilitation.

The scales evaluate the strength of the evidence for proposed change, the ability of the organizational context to support change, and organizational capacity for change. The ORCA is a self-report and structured survey instrument that evaluates evidence and organizational-level perceptions that aim at implementing a particular evidence-based practice intervention (Stewart et al., 2021).

This tool will be critical to understanding the perception of evidence to support the change initiative among employees. Based on the outcomes of the tool, the organization is ready for change through the EBP process.

Strategies To Better Facilitate the Readiness of The Organization
Strategies to better facilitate organizational readiness in this case include engaging employees to offer their opinions, integrating technologies to improve acceptance of change among the employees, and effective communication (Vax et al., 2021).

Additionally, the organization should use a change implementation model like Kotter’s 8-step process or Kurt Lewin’s change model. These models offer a systematic approach to change implementation and better engagement as well as communication (Lindsay, 2023). For instance, Kotter’s 8-step process can facilitate better EBP change implementation based on its elaborate steps and processes.

Organizational Culture in Supporting and Sustaining EBP Change
The organizational culture will not only support but also sustain an evidence-based practice change through its norms, values, and mission as well as vision statements. For instance, being a learning and innovative organization with a leadership structure that embraces and engages employees, the culture will support the change.

The commitment to high-quality care implies that the organization will focus on better ways to improve care delivery for diverse patients and improve hand hygiene practices to lower nosocomial infections (Sandbekken et al., 2023). While barriers like limited experience and insufficient resources exist, the overall perception and motivation to implement change will enhance its ability to deliver quality care to patients.

Most nurses may lack sufficient knowledge and skills in EBP but through training, they can enhance their understanding and be ready to implement the proposed initiative. Stakeholder support will be critical for the success of the project as it will require all players to work through a team under the project manager. The support will ensure sufficient resources and personnel to implement the proposed EBP project.

The timing of the proposal is significant as the healthcare system focuses on patient-centered quality and affordable care (Melnyk et al., 2022). Therefore, the implementation of this project is timely for the organization and the stakeholders to improve patient care. The project will require sufficient resources to attain its goals and objectives, especially personnel and experts.

Improving Quality, Safety & Cost-Effectiveness

The organization can improve quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness through deliberate strategies that include setting goals, developing a collaborative team, executing all the plans, and integrating technologies to monitor the implementation. Furthermore, the organization should ensure that all aspects of the proposed project are implemented to improve quality, and safety and reduce costs associated with adverse events (Stewart et al., 2021).

The organizations should also empower nurses and other providers through information and skills acquisition to have a positive perception of change implementation projects and reduce possible resistance.

Project Stakeholders

The proposed EBP project will have various stakeholders with distinct yet complementary and associated roles. These include the project manager and project sponsor, the project team that will be drawn from various departments and comprises a chief nursing officer and one nurse leader, a physician, a psychiatric mental health nurse, a support and administrative staff, and information technology personnel as well as the finance manager (Parreira et al., 2021).

The project manager will be the deliver the proposed project through apportioning roles and duties to different players in the team. The project sponsor will offer resources and okay the project while expecting the team to meet the expected deliverables.

The project team will work together with the project manager to implement all aspects of the project (Melnyk et al., 2022). Each member of the team will represent their department to ensure that the project meets their needs and concerns.

The various members from diverse departments will offer input on the project to help attain the set goals and objectives. For instance, the information technology staff will ensure all information and data concerning the project are kept and retrieved as required.

The external stakeholders will include patients, their families the community, the general public, and regulatory agencies at the state and even federal level, if necessary.

External stakeholders like patients will give their views on the proposed project to improve its goals and objectives. The stakeholders, especially internal and project managers, will work collaboratively based on their unique roles to attain set goals and objectives.

Information & Communication Technologies for the Project

Information and communication technologies are critical to the delivery of quality care and an integral part of project implementation. These technologies will aid in producing project-related materials like work schedules and structure and production of reports as well as patient health information (Adelman-Mullally et al., 2023).

For instance, these resources will enable communication among providers, sharing information for better decision-making, and gathering evidence on the effectiveness of the proposed intervention. These technologies will include smartphones, tablets, telemonitoring devices, electronic health records, and web-based resources. The facility will integrate these technologies through its systems and train nurses on using them to deliver care.

Through smartphones, the project team will provide resources to enhance better care while telemonitoring devices will help gather sufficient data on falls and the number of patients experiencing them. Tablets will aid in gathering data while electronic health records will offer information about patients and their diagnoses to develop effective interventions.

Web-based resources will improve communication and interactions with patients and providers to reduce susceptibility to falls. The facility will integrate these technologies through its systems and train nurses on using them to deliver care.

The organization will integrate these technologies through developing responsive systems based on vendor applications to align with the current one within the organization.

Improving Nursing Practice and Care Delivery

These technologies will enhance the interoperability or sharing of patient health information for better decision-making and care provision. The technologies will also enhance communication among nurses and other health care providers as well as engagement of patients.

Additionally, the technologies will enable nurses and all stakeholders to gather data on the outcomes and effectiveness of the EBP project (Abu-Baker et al., 2021).

Population and individuals will enhance their wellness through reduced infections and better care. For instance, hospitalized patients susceptible to infections will encounter reduced possibility and risk of infection through effective hand hygiene measures.

Conclusion

Implementing an evidence-based practice (EBP) project requires an assessment of the overall readiness of an organization and its culture. The readiness and culture set the stage for implementing the intervention and improving the quality of care.

Implementing the proposed change will require the integration of different aspects; from nurses’ readiness to all stakeholders and tools like technologies and assessment instruments to determine the level and quality of readiness.

References

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