One experiment I would try is having a system for a nurse to do foley care and prevent UTI’s

One experiment I would try is having a system for a nurse to do foley care and prevent UTI’s. I would be improving a CAUTI due to the high risk of catching a UTI related to poor Foley catheter care. I would have a system where foley care is going to be in the “to do list” for when nurses have their agenda for the day. I want it to be a part of their head to toe assessment for when the nurses first get there, or it will be part of the CNA agenda depending on the policy of the hospital or the unit they work on. Foley care would be just as important as passing meds. I would add foley care into a system just like MAR. I would have Foley care kit locked up and all nurses or CNA will be required to sign in and grab the foley care cleaning kit. They will go through the whole route as if they were giving medication such as scanning the patient band, the foley cleaning kit, and then apply the cleaning. Then you would have to chart if the foley is intact, clean, or anything going wrong in the gentile area. Some of the weakness is this could be very time consuming, but if you do the care at the same time you are giving medication, then I do not think this should be a problem. One other weakness is what I would have in the foley care kit and could possibly cost a lot of money toward the hospital. One of the strengths in this experiment is the prevention of UTIs and I find this a huge deal in health care especially for our elderly. Another strength about the foley care is that it will be highly monitored every shift for a nurse so if any problem is occurring it could be solved very early. I would do this experiment for three months where one unit will do it for three months and the other units will continue their ordinary practice with foley care. I would put all the statistical data together and see how effective this experiment really is.

The clinical quality problem I would pick is post surgery infections. I would use the quasi- experimental design to test cause and effect relationships between certain factors and how they could be influencing these infection rates. What I think is a strength to this type of experiment is that it is a random assignment. This is good because we can assign certain practices to random surgeries between different surgeons. For example, If we were having problems with infection rates in knee replacement surgeries, we could ask the nurse to prep 2-3 times instead of the normal 1-2 times, we could also make sure the processing of sterile instruments is up to date, or even use a different process of handing off instruments to make sure there is less contamination in these surgeries. The text book states, however, that using random assignment is a weakness in this type of experiment due to the fact that there could be outlying factors that influence the outcomes of the study. I don’t think this would be the case for my study, because it is a controlled environment. If we were going to investigate ways to bring down knee replacement related infections, we would need to pick surgeries at random, that includes the surgeons performing the surgery and what patients are getting the interventions. Lets say patients X,Y, and Z are all scheduled to have knee surgeries today, at random patient Y gets picked to have the interventions ( extra prep, and less handling/passing off of instruments). Patients X and Z would be a good comparison to see the differences in healing from their surgery and patient Y’s surgery. There are some things that could become a problem for this study though, patient Y could have an underlying cause or an autoimmune disease that makes recovery from surgery more difficult, leading the results astray. All in all I think with careful choosing of potential patients, this could be a good experiment.