The proposed project is a teaching plan for nurses, a Powerpoint presentation, and a post-presentation survey to ensure that the nurses have learned strategies to improve patient flow. This is necessary because better throughput/flow affects patient satisfaction, but has not been a focus of nursing education. Because of its importance to patient satisfaction, this is a well-chosen plan.
Some wording is confusing. The student says s/he will address flow from arrival to discharge, whether “back to the community or to an inpatient unit”; but otherwise, per the title and the target audience, the student wants to address flow in the ED (which would end upon discharge to inpatient) and flow as an inpatient. So I would either change “Inpatient” in the title to “Patient” and plan to educate ED nurses, with the possibility of a later program to address inpatient; or if the student thinks s/he can address both, rewrite the statement to read arrival to discharge “from the hospital”.
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The rationale, “Currently, there is no education provided to ED or inpatient nurses on the importance of timely patient flow and how inefficient throughput effects patient satisfaction scores hospital-wide,” could also be slightly rewritten (in addition to “affects” in this context). While the importance of the topic should be covered in the presentation to motivate the attendees, I think importance is not the focus of this education project, as reflected in the proposed survey. Rather, the focus of the presentation is actually to teach the strategies that will improve throughput/flow.
Please see Jabbour, M. et al. (2013), “Best strategies to implement clinical pathways in an emergency department setting: Study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial,” Implementation Science, 8(1), 55-66. The authors investigate the use of clinical pathways for asthma and gastroenteritis, to focus on best practices in a chaotic environment where fast throughput is desired. Without this best-practice focus, fast flow could increase the risk of errors.
