Though any nursing job takes skill and compassion, the long-term care sector often has the most fragile patients—and therefore, one of the most challenging assignments. The nurses at ALFs, SNFs, and CCRCs in particular need to be on top of their game so they can help prevent adverse events like falls and be responsive and calm when incidents occur.
You may hire the best nurses, but this isn’t always enough for high-need populations. What can you do as an organization to help them improve the quality of their senior care each day?
Free Your Team from Spreadsheets and Data Entry
While documentation is a necessary part of any nursing job, it detracts from nurses’ valuable face-to-face time with residents. Reducing manual data entry allows your nurses to provide the quality care residents need, and may increase the satisfaction rates of your residents and their families. Your nurses can then spend their time doing what they were hired to do, which may boost their enthusiasm as well as appreciation from residents and their families.
Incident reporting in a spreadsheet or other basic system monopolizes your nurses’ time—but the right incident management system could change this dramatically. Communities using QA Reader for incident tracking, quality assurance reporting, and frequent faller tracking get their staff away from spreadsheets and back to resident care. On average, administrative workload is reduced by 500 hours per facility per year. That’s 500 more hours reallocated to resident care.
Handle Incidents with Less Stress
Even the best nurses can’t prevent every incident all the time—they need the necessary tools to deal with incidents quickly, professionally, and calmly when they do happen.
When a fall occurs and your nurses complete incident reports, what happens to them from there? Are your valuable management nurses sitting behind a desk in the morning, inputting this information into a poorly designed tracking spreadsheet? This is not only a poor use of their time but it can contribute to fewer resident care hours and job dissatisfaction!
A good risk management system should not only be clear and easy to use, it should prompt you to collect all of the essential information without guesswork. Think about how valuable your nursing team is in identifying the root cause of an incident. Why keep them tied down to a computer when they can be assisting the rest of the care team in identifying why an incident occurred—and hopefully prevent another?
Help Prevent Incidents
An incident can be frustrating and nerve wracking for nursing staff who feel they’re doing everything they can to keep residents safe. But simply responding to an incident after it happens and recording it in a spreadsheet won’t provide you—or your nurses—with insight that could help you reduce adverse events in the future.
Your nurses could use information that states when, why, and how incidents are occurring so they can work to prevent them. Risk managers can also provide ideas on how to reduce future incidents. But remember: without identifying the root cause of an incident—the when, why and how an incident occurred—we can't prevent them. Even with the best risk managers reviewing incidents, without an incident management system designed to improve quality of care in senior living communities, you may never get to the root cause and equip your nurses with the tools they need to prevent similar incidents—ultimately providing better care.
Empower your nurses to be their best each day with a system that’s designed for the daily life of senior living facilities. A productive, focused nursing staff adds up to better care and happier, healthier residents.
Next Steps
- Learn more about QA Reader and how it can empower your team.
- Take the next step and see how QA Reader can simplify reporting and support your nursing staff with a personalized demo.
