The Finnish consortium for the national benchmarking of nursing-sensitive outcomes
In 2016, all five university hospitals in Finland started their collaboration to collect and benchmark nursing-sensitive outcomes. Currently, 15 of the 23 public Finnish healhtcare organisations have joined the consortium.
Nursing-sensitive quality of care, what is it about?
Nursing structures, such as skill-mix, competence and nursing leadership, and processes (e.g., pressure injury risk assessment, administration of medication) affect patient care outcomes (e.g., pressure injury incidence), but also personnel outcomes, such as nurses’ job satisfaction and engagement. Nursing structures and processes affect also organisational outcomes, such as patient care costs, length of treatment periods.
What is the purpose of the Consortium?
The objectives to follow-up and benchmark nursing-sensitive quality of care are:
To support nursing leadership
To generate benchmarked data of nursing-sensitive quality indicators for decision-making and follow-up.
To support nursing staff
To foster nursing staff’s knowledge of outcomes of one’s work; thus, to foster quality assurance in clinical nursing care.
To support nursing profession
To enable benchmarking in nursing and sharing best nursing practices
To identify potential quality gaps for development, research and education purposes
To ensure quality and safety for the patients and clients
To make the patient (client) care outcomes visible and comparable
To ensure safe, effective and best possible care for the patients and clients