Practicum: Role of TQM

Meet with a nurse leader and explore the role of total quality management in the organization.

Introduction

The discussion is the outcome of the interaction with the nurse leader Mrs. X, online by email The communication with the nurse leader was based on the roe of the total quality management (TQM) in the organisation. The paper discuses the views of the nurse leader on the involvement of the senior leadership in the quality improvement initiatives as it pertain to their success failures. The nurse’s viewpoint on elimination of the barriers to improve and on the stakeholder’s involvement is also discussed.

Involvement of senior leadership in the TQM

The nurse leader said, “People need to know their senior leaders are interested and supportive”. According to Mrs X, for successful TQM initiatives senior leadership is the central point. Senior leadership involvement is important for facilitating conformance to internal requirements and reduces the defects for quality improvement. It requires involvement of strong leadership in identifying the inappropriate care delivery process and refine in a manner that will decrease the cost and time. According to the nurse leader, it is incredibly difficult and challenging to take quality initiatives without the senior leadership support. Her views align with the elements of iSixSigma for successful TQM. One of the elements is the leadership (Parand et al., 2014).

According to McFadden et al. (2015), senior leadership is necessary to have motivational impact on the workforce that leads to successful initiatives. This further stimulates the other top performers in the organisation to participate. This process has dual benefits. It will lead to quality improvement as well a career development. The same was mentioned by the nurse leader in email that her transformational leadership as a senior nurse inspired others to participate in the quality initiatives. When she has taken initiative for enhancing the patient centred care in the organisation, the other nurses demonstrated interest and kept asking pertinent questions. She could motivate them by recognising their demands and valuing their effort and decisions. It helped her to increase the person centred care delivered  in the geriatric care.

Stakeholder involvement

As per the nurse leader, it is important to have the involvement of all employees in the organisation. It is important to have trained employees to integrate the quality into the design process. This is possible by eliminating the fears from the workplace. Lack of self-managed work teams is the barrier to quality improvement. It is necessary to eliminate these barriers for continuous improvement. Involvement of stakeholders early in the process helps to take preventive measures for the concerned issue (Van Bogaert et al., 2014). Mr X informed that she has taken the i nitiatives of fall prevention in the geriatric care by developing facebook page on fall prevention initiatives. It increased the involvement of all the stakeholders (nurses, nurse mangers, patients, and other board members) and led to policy development in this area. Several barriers such as lack of CTVs in the ER, unawareness among nurses, and emergency alert system such as wristbands for fall risk patients were eliminated.  According to Verleye et al. (2014), stakeholders are important in policy making or overcoming the barriers related to cost, resources and patient safety. Early involvement of the stakeholders helps to stay focused on the issue and introduce new measures for quality improvement.

References

McFadden, K. L., Stock, G. N., & Gowen III, C. R. (2015). Leadership, safety climate, and continuous quality improvement: impact on process quality and patient safety. Health care management review, 40(1), 24-34.

Parand, A., Dopson, S., Renz, A., & Vincent, C. (2014). The role of hospital managers in quality and patient safety: a systematic review. BMJ open, 4(9), e005055.

Van Bogaert, P., van Heusden, D., Timmermans, O., & Franck, E. (2014). Nurse work engagement impacts job outcome and nurse-assessed quality of care: model testing with nurse practice environment and nurse work characteristics as predictors. Frontiers in psychology, 5.

Verleye, K., Gemmel, P., & Rangarajan, D. (2014). Managing engagement behaviors in a network of customers and stakeholders: Evidence from the nursing home sector. Journal of Service Research, 17(1), 68-84.