Managing Change and Improving Quality

· Discuss connections to the content of last week’s readings.

· Identify specific occasions from your clinical experience in which you observed a nurse acting as an agent of change or when you were the nurse who was the agent of change. Discuss what it means to be an agent of change from the context of that experience. Why do nurses need to learn the skills of an effective change agent? If possible, use the same experience to address the following:

· Discuss the circumstances in terms of change theory.

· Using Box 5-2 on page 64 of Effective Leadership and Management in Nursing, delineate what took place in terms of the 7 steps of the change process.

· What strategies were employed? Would a different strategy have worked better?

· Describe any barriers that were resisting change. How were they handled? Was the manner they were handled effective? If not, what could have been done to improve how they were handled?

· Identify a needed change in the unit or organization. Using the change process, outline the steps you would take to initiate that change.

· Identify your organization’s quality improvement strategy for meeting the Joint Commission’s national safety goals.

· Select one of the goals and identify the improvement model used, the standard established by the Joint Commission, the indicator that is used to determine whether that standard is met or not, and the evidence that the indicator is derived from.

· Identify what barriers existed to the change.

· Evaluate the results of the improvement strategy and determine if there may have been better options gaining the improvement.

· What is your organization’s risk management program? What is its process for identifying risk? What is its process for evaluating and analyzing risk? What is its process for reducing or eliminating risk? What is your role in risk management?

Pick 6 of the above solid bullet points. 100 words each.

Must include 4 references from professional journal, APA style. No Wikipedia.