Cost-effective Care (Nursing)

00:00 Welcome back everyone. In today's challenging healthcare economy, resources are limited for most everyone. One strategy which may assist is to provide and encourage cost-effective care. Now as the largest group of healthcare professionals in the workforce, registered nurses are well positioned to provide cost-effective healthcare. Now the term cost-effective does not mean never spending any money or resources to diagnose, treat, and manage diseases. It does, however, require being smart with decisions on how, when, and where to invest your resources. Ordering the right test at the right time to safely diagnose conditions without needless ways entails not only critical thinking to ask the right questions to get the right information, but also easily accessible decision-making support and multidisciplinary teamwork. Delivering cost-effective care in a complex hospital system with lots of moving parts starts with recognizing the relationship between the moving parts and identifying opportunities for improvement. Now a never event is a serious incident or error that should not occur if proper safety procedures are followed. One thing that's really important for healthcare organizations to remember, healthcare organizations are not reimbursed for events which are considered preventable. Now healthcare organizations try to reduce never events. Examples of a never event could include surgery performed on the wrong body part or on the wrong patient, a patient death or serious disability associated with the medication error, a patient death associated with the fall while being cared for in a healthcare facility. Another strategy to provide cost-effective care is to reduce the length of stay. Now reducing the length of stay does not mean discharging a patient before they're ready. Healthcare organizations can facilitate a reduce length to stay through preventing errors which would extend the stay unnecessarily or would delay a discharge when patients are medically ready to go home. Common reasons for an extended hospital stay might include miscommunication, poor planning, or when families or nursing homes aren't yet ready to take on the person being discharged.

02:16 Another strategy to provide cost-effective care could be to reduce burnout and expensive turnover.

02:22 When the patient burden increases, caregivers get burned out and when caregivers get burned out caregivers leaves taking more desirable working conditions, but it's expensive to train new staff due to turnover and this can be increasingly hard to find replacement caregivers with the growing nursing shortage. So hospital should maintain, grow, and optimize caregiver staff to keep up with patient care. And hospitals can also help nurses work smarter, not harder. Another strategy could be to improve work processes and optimize nursing care. You could increase efficiencies in the workplace environment. You could consider practicing lean management which is the ability to reduce non-value-add activities in the workplace. You could identify and automate repetitive administrative tasks, you could provide opportunities for more time at the patient bedside for nurses, and you could increase the time actually spent with patients. Now increasing the time nurses spend with patients will have a direct impact on cost-effective care by increasing job satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and quality of care provided to patients. So remember, as clinicians, consultants, researchers, policy leaders, administrators, and educators registered nurses offer innovations that reduce cost and enhance the effectiveness of the health system.

03:39 So when thinking of everything we've learned today, I would like for you to consider this question.

03:44 What are 3 common reasons patients experience an unnecessary extended hospital stay? Miscommunication, poor planning, and when families or nursing homes aren't yet ready to take on the person being discharged. So I hope you've enjoyed today's video on Cost-effective Care. Thank you so much for watching.