Examine critically health and safety legislation and regulations to maintain safe work and care environments in adult nursing
Assessment Task:
The assessment for this assignment will be a Service Improvement Report. The patient safety
problem/quality issue can be identified from a number of sources for example : NHS Improvement,
CQC report, Ofsted report, problem/issues identified via DATIX, serious case review, research
evidence, common concern raised in the media. The focus will be to address this problem/issue and
provide a structured plan to support improvements through the service improvement report.
3. What is the purpose of this assessment?
To equip you with the theoretical knowledge and skills required for your future role as newly qualified
nurse (NQN) when contributing to risk monitoring, quality care provision and optimised service
improvements.
You should be able to:
Examine critically health and safety legislation and regulations to maintain safe work and care
environments in adult nursing
Appraise improvement methodologies
Analyse critically service delivery evaluations, audit findings, near misses, critical incidents,
major incidents and serious adverse events in adult nursing to identify improvement needs for
care delivery with people, their families, carers and colleagues
Apply critically the theory and strategies underpinning risk aversion, risk management and
uncertainty
4. What is expected of me in this assessment?
Grading for this assignment will not be based on the success of the quality improvement project; it will
be graded on the process. However this service improvement plan will need to be SMART (specific,
measurable, achievable, realistic, timely).
The essay must have the following topics:
Introduction: Provide a summary of the problem followed by a presentation of what you will
discuss in this essay, according to the chosen problem/issue. Also, you must include a Rationale
for developing this improvement report (how you got started with this project and what drove you
to tackle this ).
Background: This section you will provide a background information about the problem with upto-date
research and knowledge from the literature and the current
policies/guidelines/legislations related to this topic that is important to highlight.
Measurement: you will apply the ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS, using the fishbone cause and effect
diagram, to investigate (brainstorming) the possible causes of this problem and their effects on
patient/quality of care. You will choose one cause of this problem to develop your improvement
report and will summarize the existing evidence that this cause exists.
Design: With the support of the literature, you will have to explain why this specific cause
described in the Measurement was chosen. This step is critical for others to understand the
thinking behind the development of your intervention. You will describe the intervention that you
plan to implement to improve the cause of this problem, what team members will be involved in
the plan/application of the intervention, for how long the intervention will last and what will be any
potential problems at this stage.
Strategy: you will use the intervention described in the Design to present your improvement
report’s whole strategy (the PDSA cycle):
o Plan: the intervention will be put in place
o Do: how the intervention will you will carry out and how you will collect data to analyse
the effects of the intervention. Also, the problems you may expect
o Study: how you will analyse the data you collected to assess the efficacy of the
intervention
o Act: what will be the plan if your intervention might not work or what additional
interventions could be added in the future.
Conclusion: you should provide a summary of the key points of your improvement report, noting
what is already known on this topic and what your improvement report might add, such as
benefits, financial savings (demonstrate that your intervention helps to add value to the service,
patient care and/or staff).
