Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

5-2021

Document Type

DNP Project

Department

Nursing

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Catherine Garner

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Tonja Hartjes

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Linda Gibson

Abstract

A culture of safety in healthcare settings supports a caring environment and practices that produce quality patient outcomes. Leadership is instrumental in creating a culture of safety. The purpose of this quantitative pretest-posttest design project was to determine if the implementation of leader rounds in an acute care hospital had an impact on staff nurses’ perceptions of safety culture as measured by the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. The setting was a midsize acute care hospital with a target population of dayshift nurses working in the telemetry service line. Leader rounds were conducted over a six-week timeline by the department director. Data analysis was conducted using a paired-samples t test. The major finding of this study was a reduction in the post safety score after the implementation of leader rounds; however, it was not statistically significant. There are significant factors that may explain the findings in this study. The leaders conducting rounds were middle management rather than executive-level leaders. The staff exposure to leader rounds showed that only a small minority of staff had participated in leader rounds over the six-week time frame. Lastly, during the study period, the hospital units experienced a heavy influx of COVID-19 patients, resulting in higher acuity patients and a higher than normal volume of acutely ill patients on these units. Despite the drop in perception of a culture of safety, a majority of the participants wanted leader rounds to continue. Hospital leaders should continue to evaluate the role of rounding absent a population crisis and with modifications to ensure staff participation.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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