NURS FPX 6222 Assessment 2 Quality and Safety Gap Analysis

NURS FPX 6222 Assessment 2 Quality and Safety Gap Analysis Student Name Capella University NURS-FPX6222 Healthcare Safety and Quality Management Professor Name Submission Date   Quality and Safety Gap Analysis A quality and safety gap analysis helps evaluate how an organization measures up against its expectations, based on its mission and patient safety objectives. The analysis will help pinpoint the impact of poor communication on patient safety and quality of service (Leotin, 2025), regarding the health care professionals’ communication gap. These issues that can arise are handover issues, lack of clarity, and communication delays. Systemic Problem in an Organization If there is no communication among the healthcare staff, the practice of primary care nursing and bedside care of complicated patients may be adversely affected. There are some communication issues in the clinic that are linked to this low-quality score. The aforementioned communication gap occurs due to some of the communication issues that exist between the healthcare crew, poor information exchange when conducting handovers, and poor working relationships between nurses and other healthcare professionals (Leotin, 2025). This is compounded by the lack of staff, communication skills training, and accountability issues discussed above, which contribute to some discrepancies in the delivery of health services to patients. Information that is important to some patients may not be transferred to other healthcare professionals in time, or not passed at all, which may pose some threats to patients’ health, such as infection from other patients while hospitalization (Alharazi et al. 2025). Furthermore, the lack of quality control and patient communication strategy involvement by leaders is likely to have a negative impact on patients’ health. Knowledge Gaps and Areas of Uncertainty But, from the data presented, little can be concluded on what factors may be responsible for the lack of effective communication among nurses. In addition, no improvement plans seem to have been established about improving practitioners’ communication skills or whether there are any information gaps among the team members (Alharazi et al., 2025). Furthermore, no information has been stated that would suggest that there is anything problematic with patients. Also, there is no information about the organizational culture of the institution. Proposed Practice Changes to Improve Nursing and Bedside Care Quality But there are some changes needed to ensure that information is shared at a high level in primary care between health care practitioners, including nurses. First, it’s changing the ratio of patients to nurses by using an evidence-based staffing model so as not to overstress nurses, which in turn will not affect patient communication with the nurse or other health care staff. Second, there are a few techniques of communication (situation, background, assessment, and recommendation (SBAR), bedside rounds, competency training) which can be very useful when conveying information to others (Muir et al., 2025). In addition, dashboards should be applied in the exchange of information between people, and the continuous quality improvement strategy should be employed in this exchange. Last but not least, multi-disciplinary meetings may be very helpful in the case in question. Assumptions The recommendations presented on how to improve the communication among healthcare workers are based on the following assumptions. First, it is expected that the organization will have to spend resources on setting up efficient communication mechanisms, and second, that the organization will have the finances to introduce communication mechanisms of this nature. (Muir et al., 2025) Second, it can be assumed that the nurses and other health care workers will be actively involved in the training process and cooperatively develop communication skills with no inhibitions. Third, it is assumed that health workers will remain engaged in using the communication mechanisms that are currently in place and will be involved in quality improvement. Fourth, it is hoped that multidisciplinary working and feedback on performances will help to improve patient safety and quality. Prioritization of Proposed Practice Changes at Baptist Health Floyd Evidence-based nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in the clinic are the most important change that should be made to improve healthcare professionals’ communication. Where nurse workload is close to safety limits, some indications of a decrease in nurse-to-patient ratios are related to poorer measures of patient-care outcomes, such as higher risk of adverse outcomes like infection, delay in treatment, and the risk of communication errors, which can be as high as about 10-30% (Kang et al., 2026). Staffing problems lead to overburden, delayed, and inadequate communications with patients and a higher risk of patient safety adverse events like infection, failure to give medications, etc. Failure to provide nurses adequate time and resources for effective communication will most likely result in an unsuccessful implementation of a communication tool or any other quality improvement initiative (Leotin, 2025). Therefore, staffing is the key element to improving communication between a healthcare provider and patient, as well as improving patient safety. Structured communication systems (such as SBAR), hourly rounding, and competency-based communication training at the point of care need to be implemented as well, along with the improvements in staffing levels. Studies have shown that the use of structured communication tools, like SBAR, has decreased the incidence of communication errors, thus providing perfection in the exchange of information and leading to an overall decrease in the rate of adverse events within multiple healthcare facilities (Shrivastava, 2025). This is important because it will minimise inconsistencies in passing information on between shifts of the same employee and therefore maximise the opportunities for important information about a patient to be passed on to the next employee. Lastly, the use of real-time performance dashboards and interdisciplinary meetings to assess the effectiveness of current communication systems will help health care organizations work to continually improve the quality of care (Muir et al., 2025). This mixture of both methods is used to enhance cross-functional working, communication, and patient care and safety. Practice Changes Fostering a Culture of Quality and Safety The clinic is seeking to enhance patient safety by focusing on improving the quality of care by resolving the communication issues among the providers. The three principles of nursing will be utilized