Quality Improvement & Safety Standards Flashcards
7 cards from real ANM practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Quality Improvement & Safety Standards flashcards as text
A new evidence-based practice guideline for pressure injury prevention is published. To evaluate whether it should replace the unit's current protocol, the ANM should FIRST:
Answer: Critically appraise the evidence for validity, reliability, and applicability
Evidence-based practice requires critical appraisal of new research — evaluating its internal validity, reliability, and applicability to the specific patient population before adopting it.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement's (IHI) Triple Aim framework aims to improve healthcare by simultaneously pursuing which three goals?
Answer: Improve population health, enhance patient experience, and reduce per capita costs
IHI's Triple Aim targets three interdependent goals: improving the health of populations, improving the individual patient experience of care, and reducing per capita healthcare costs.
During a safety walkround, an ANM identifies that staff are bypassing a barcode medication administration (BCMA) alert by scanning a wristband copy taped to the medication cart. This behavior is BEST classified as:
Answer: A workflow violation that undermines a critical safety barrier
Bypassing BCMA verification defeats a critical safety barrier designed to catch wrong-patient and wrong-medication errors, representing a serious workflow violation requiring immediate correction.
An ANM reviews HCAHPS survey results showing low scores in the 'Communication about Medicines' domain. Which targeted intervention has the strongest evidence for improving this specific domain?
Answer: Adding a pharmacist to daily multidisciplinary rounds for patient education
Pharmacist participation in multidisciplinary rounds with direct patient medication counseling is strongly evidence-supported for improving patient understanding and HCAHPS medicine communication scores.
When analyzing data for a QI project, a nurse manager notices that the average length of stay (LOS) is 4.2 days but the median LOS is 3.1 days. This discrepancy most likely indicates:
Answer: A skewed distribution likely caused by a small number of very long stays
When the mean exceeds the median, the distribution is positively skewed — a few patients with very long stays are pulling the average up while most patients have shorter stays.
The concept of 'high reliability organizations' (HROs) in healthcare is derived from which industries' safety models?
Answer: Nuclear power and commercial aviation
HRO principles were adapted from nuclear power plants and commercial aviation — industries that manage complex, high-risk operations with remarkably low rates of catastrophic failure.
An ANM is tasked with reducing patient falls on a medical unit. After implementing a fall prevention bundle, falls decrease from 5.2 to 2.1 per 1,000 patient days. Which action should follow to sustain this improvement?
Answer: Standardize the successful interventions and embed them into routine workflows
In the 'Act' phase of PDSA, successful interventions should be standardized, embedded into policies and workflows, and spread to other units to sustain improvement gains.