The Organization and Administration of the Nursing Staff’s Work

In healthcare facilities, one of the most challenging workforce issues is the organization and administration of the nursing staff’s work to guarantee a high level of patient safety. In their article, Tvedt, Sjetne, Helgeland, and Bukholm (2012) focused on studying the specific organizational processes that can be used to improve patient safety, as well as the overall quality of the nurses’ work. Therefore, the purpose of this discussion is to describe the problem and objectives of the conducted research and to assess the study in terms of its credibility and validity.

Research Problems, Purpose, and Objectives

In their study, the researchers identified the following problem: the organizational design and processes play the key role in contributing to the implementation of the patient safety initiatives, but the problem is in the lack of knowledge and evidence regarding the most effective organizational processes to increase the patient safety in hospitals (Tvedt, Sjetne, Helgeland, & Bukholm, 2012, p. 1). As a result, the purpose of the study was formulated in the following way: “to identify organizational processes and structures that are associated with nurse-reported patient safety and quality of nursing” (Tvedt et al., 2012, p. 1). The authors also focused on determining the objectives of the study, and they stated that the research aimed to explore the visions of the nurses regarding the organizational design’s effectiveness and associated safety of patients. It was important for the researchers to understand how the organizational processes and improvements could lead to increasing the quality of the nurses’ work, and as a result, to increase patient safety. However, there were no identified hypotheses because the researchers were focused on determining the appropriate organizational processes and measures influencing the quality of the nurses’ work and patient safety rather than on finding the relationships between any variables.

Credibility and Validity of the Study

The credibility of the article’s conclusions can be evaluated with references to the credibility of the authors and the journal in which the article is published. The authors of the article are Norwegian researchers working for the Department of Quality Measurement and Patient Safety and centers for health and medicine in Oslo. They specialize in studying patient safety issues and ways to improve the organization of the workforce in healthcare facilities. In addition, the article is published in the authoritative and peer-reviewed British Medical Journal (BMJ). As a result, the credibility of the article can be discussed as high.

The validity of the study is assessed in terms of the used research methods. The researchers utilize the appropriate cross-sectional study framework to survey the nurses’ visions on the problem and assess the available organizational processes to improve patient safety. The used survey instruments or questionnaires were properly selected to guarantee high-level consistency. In addition, the survey results were effectively analyzed with the help of such statistical methods as the factor analysis conducted with the SPSS tool (Tvedt et al., 2012). The methods and analysis tools selected according to the research purpose and objectives contributed to the high validity of the study. The conclusions were also supported by references to the previous research in the field.

Moreover, it is important to state that the study addressed the current problems in the field of nursing related to the connection between the organizational design, the quality of the nurses’ work, and patient safety. The study also provided the findings that can improve the organization of the nurses’ work while implementing the assessed processes.

Reference

Tvedt, C., Sjetne, I. S., Helgeland, J., & Bukholm, G. (2012). A cross-sectional study to identify organisational processes associated with nurse-reported quality and patient safety. British Medical Journal, 2(6), 1-10.