Workarounds: How nurse leaders can minimize their risks

Risk Education Presented by NSO

Workarounds: How nurse leaders can minimize their risks 

Nurses must contend with many competing demands during a typical shift (delivering care to patients, educating families, communicating with other members of the healthcare team, to name just a few), often causing them to seek ways to compress everything they must do into a short time frame.

In these situations, it can be tempting to engage in “workarounds”, subverting policies, procedures, and even standards of care to pick up precious minutes. The goal is a worthy one — more time with patients. But workarounds are potentially dangerous to patients and nurses, with some leading to serious consequences such as harm to patients and subsequent legal actions against nurses — and the organizations that employ them.

Nurse leaders and healthcare administrators can protect nurses, themselves, and their organizations from legal jeopardy by understanding the nature of workarounds and creating an environment that minimizes them.

To Read the complete article- NSO RM Article_Workarounds_WC1107