Redefining "time" to meet nursing's evolving demands / Marian Altman, William Rosa

The first of a three-part series on how the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses Clinical Scene Investigator Academy helps clinical nurses cultivate skills that measurably demonstrate how nonproductive time is a misnomer that interferes with achieving optimal patient outcomes is presented. Healthcare organizations imported the terms productive and nonproductive from manufacturing. Unfortunately, this has meant that only time spent in direct care at the bedside is considered productive. Time required to assess, plan, and evaluate care is deemed nonproductive, as is time away from the bedside for education and committee work. As the nursing profession evolves beyond the confines of unifocal, traditional bedside practice to include the creation of new knowledge, research by nurse scientists, and cultivation of nurse-driven leadership initiatives, there's a call to expand the current notion of productivity to include not only intervention implementation, but also the assessments, planning, and evaluations crucial to the successful provision of quality patient care.

Nursing