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Welcome back everyone. In today's challenging healthcare economy, resources are limited for most
everyone. One strategy which may assist is to provide and encourage cost-effective care. Now
as the largest group of healthcare professionals in the workforce, registered nurses are well
positioned to provide cost-effective healthcare. Now the term cost-effective does not mean never
spending any money or resources to diagnose, treat, and manage diseases. It does, however, require
being smart with decisions on how, when, and where to invest your resources. Ordering the right test
at the right time to safely diagnose conditions without needless ways entails not only critical
thinking to ask the right questions to get the right information, but also easily accessible
decision-making support and multidisciplinary teamwork. Delivering cost-effective care in a
complex hospital system with lots of moving parts starts with recognizing the relationship between
the moving parts and identifying opportunities for improvement. Now a never event is a serious
incident or error that should not occur if proper safety procedures are followed. One thing
that's really important for healthcare organizations to remember, healthcare organizations are
not reimbursed for events which are considered preventable. Now healthcare organizations try
to reduce never events. Examples of a never event could include surgery performed on the wrong
body part or on the wrong patient, a patient death or serious disability associated with the
medication error, a patient death associated with the fall while being cared for in a healthcare
facility. Another strategy to provide cost-effective care is to reduce the length of stay. Now
reducing the length of stay does not mean discharging a patient before they're ready. Healthcare
organizations can facilitate a reduce length to stay through preventing errors which would
extend the stay unnecessarily or would delay a discharge when patients are medically ready to
go home. Common reasons for an extended hospital stay might include miscommunication, poor
planning, or when families or nursing homes aren't yet ready to take on the person being discharged.
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Another strategy to provide cost-effective care could be to reduce burnout and expensive turnover.
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When the patient burden increases, caregivers get burned out and when caregivers get burned out
caregivers leaves taking more desirable working conditions, but it's expensive to train new
staff due to turnover and this can be increasingly hard to find replacement caregivers with the
growing nursing shortage. So hospital should maintain, grow, and optimize caregiver staff to keep up
with patient care. And hospitals can also help nurses work smarter, not harder. Another strategy
could be to improve work processes and optimize nursing care. You could increase efficiencies
in the workplace environment. You could consider practicing lean management which is the ability
to reduce non-value-add activities in the workplace. You could identify and automate repetitive
administrative tasks, you could provide opportunities for more time at the patient bedside for
nurses, and you could increase the time actually spent with patients. Now increasing the time
nurses spend with patients will have a direct impact on cost-effective care by increasing job
satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and quality of care provided to patients. So remember, as
clinicians, consultants, researchers, policy leaders, administrators, and educators registered
nurses offer innovations that reduce cost and enhance the effectiveness of the health system.
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So when thinking of everything we've learned today, I would like for you to consider this question.
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What are 3 common reasons patients experience an unnecessary extended hospital stay?
Miscommunication, poor planning, and when families or nursing homes aren't yet ready to take
on the person being discharged. So I hope you've enjoyed today's video on Cost-effective
Care. Thank you so much for watching.