Nursing Sensitive Indicators is a fancy industry term that refers to the metrics and rates often used to monitor factors that are directly affected by nursing care. These metrics are often used to help identify areas for improvement or further analysis. Highly effective nursing indicators tie together research findings and best practices with the intention to create better patient care.
A phrase we love to use is: You can’t fix what you can’t measure. This statement is valid in the world of nursing. If we truly want to improve the level of patient care in our organization, then we must be willing and able to measure and analyze our current performance. Nursing Sensitive Indicators are the measurement tools that help illuminate to factors on which to focus.
Fancy introductions aside, what is a typical example of a nursing sensitive indicator?
Generally speaking, indicators have several various structures:
They can be “rate” based – this could be a mortality rate
Mean (average) based – such as the mean rate of vaccinations.
Generic – Like vaccinations in general (Example – How many adults are receiving pneumococcal vaccines).
Specific – Population Specific (Example – Within the population of patients who had catheters inserted, how many acquired an infection?)
At its simplest, a nursing sensitive indicator measures a particular procedure or action that directly concerns a nurse. One potential example could be – you look at the amount of ambulatory patients who answered yes to smoking who then received a documented smoking cessation intervention:
One way to go about this would be: you would first examine the amount of patients who are identified as smokers and then determine the number of patients who were given a documented intervention.
You would then divide the number of people who were given a documented intervention by the total amount identified as smokers in order to get your rate.
Of course, this depends on your organizational goals, but once you have your rate you can determine if it is satisfactory or if it needs to be improved.
As you start to do things to improve the percentage, you can view the rate (the nurse sensitive indicator) on a regular basis in order to see if it is improving or not.
The process outlined above is a simple step by step guide to the basics of process improvement. Now, in practice this may be more convoluted, however the essential elements remain the same.
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