Nurses have a role in ensuring safety and quality in healthcare and evaluating potential threats to quality and safety

PURPOSE OF ASSIGNMENT:
Nurses have a role in ensuring safety and quality in healthcare and evaluating potential threats to quality and safety. A response plan is useful in determining the steps and actions that staff will take in a situation such as a disease outbreak.

COURSE COMPETENCY:
Evaluate responses of communicable diseases in healthcare today.
Scenario: You are the infection control nurse of a 100-bed inpatient healthcare facility. With the increasing potential for a communicable disease exposure in your facility, the chief clinical officer has tasked you with the creation of a hospital response plan for a communicable disease outbreak in your healthcare facility.

INSTRUCTIONS
Create a hospital response plan that effectively addresses a healthcare facility’s actions in response to a communicable disease outbreak of your choosing. The response plan should:

1. Identify a communicable disease and explain why this particular disease necessitates a response plan.

2. Be supported by current evidence.

3. Include guidance on the following:
A) Logistics: adequate physical resources and services required
B) Triage: appropriate protocols and location
C) Communication: timely and effective contact internal and external of the facility regarding a suspected or confirmed outbreak.
D) Infection control: sufficient measures to protect hospital employees, patients, and the public
E) Human resources: efficient management of human capital in response to a suspected or confirmed outbreak
F) Responsibilities of various hospital departments: effective interventions by primary and ancillary departments in response to a suspected or confirmed outbreak

4. Reflect the nurse’s ability to:
A) Assess and identify the disease outbreak
B) Support containment and treatment of the disease
C) Facilitate timely communication regarding the outbreak

For additional information on hospital preparedness for epidemics, consider exploring the World Health Organization’s 2014 report.