Unit Code: NSP850

Unit Name: Risk Management and Improving Health Care in Specialty Practice

Description: Risk management is essential for maintaining quality care for clients in any health care settings. Risk management is a systematic approach to maintaining and improving the quality of client/patient care within the health system. Risk Management is guided by three broad attributes: high standards of care, transparent responsibility and accountability for those standards and a constant dynamic improvement. This course addresses five main areas; improving quality of client/patient care; ethical, legal and professional aspects of nursing for accountability purpose; appropriate risk management; improvement of staff performance; and networking with stakeholders. Networking facilitates participation of stakeholders, avoids duplication of services and optimizes use of available resources. Students are expected to be conversant with the above five main focus areas of this course as they are also expected to take leadership roles in the emergency unit. Throughout this subject emphasis will be given to developing students’ skills to improve the quality of care, networking, political behaviour and the effective use of data. The class activities will include problem solving, reflecting and exploring strategies and policy analysis to improve quality of patient management in specialty practice.

Learning Target Outcomes: On successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 1. Develop a risk management framework for various nursing care settings with ethical, legal, and professional consideration. 2. Design innovative strategies to improve quality nursing service delivery. 3. Devise effective risk management systems for various nursing clinical settings. 4. Apply strategies to upskill nurses to manage emergencies 5. Propose strategies to facilitate networking with stakeholders. 6. Explore the power structures and behaviours that exist in health services. 7. Analyse how political behaviour is used to influence decision making. 8. Critically evaluate existing policies to improve health care delivery in the specialty practice.

Prerequisite: N/A

Prerequisite Sentence: N/A

Credit Point: 30

Offered In: Semester 1,2