Award Date

5-1-2019

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing (ND)

Department

Nursing

First Committee Member

Rhigel A. Tan

Second Committee Member

Roseanne Colosimo

Third Committee Member

Jay Shen

Number of Pages

84

Abstract

Hospitals in the United States are experiencing disruptions to patient throughput. These disruptions create barriers to patients who seek emergent care in the Emergency Department (ED) and who must be moved to hospital inpatient beds after the decision to admit has been made. As a result, patients requiring hospital admission via the ED may have long wait times, which, in turn, contribute to ED crowding and overcrowding. The root causes of ED overcrowding are inefficiencies within the system and the inability of hospitals to meet demand. Although bed capacity on any given unit may not be altered, ED patient’s arrival at an assigned unit may be expedited using an evidence-based practice (EBP) guide that can help to establish standardization among the staff who are responsible for such placement. The purpose of this DNP project is to develop workflows and a guide by using EBP to improve hospital throughput. With the improvement of hospital throughput, boarding of patients and ED overcrowding can be significantly reduced and potentially eliminated. The guide will describe cost-effective EBPs organizations can deploy to streamline patient throughput from the ED, enhance hospital patient throughput, and identify methods that ease ED overcrowding. In addition to providing an overview of each selected practice, expected outcomes, and the source of each practice, the guide will also summarize the various processes that have been successful in addressing ED overcrowding and hospital patient throughput. This guide will reflect an interprofessional, collaborative design which can support developing a solution from a systematic approach.

Keywords

Bed control; Patient flow; Patient placement

Disciplines

Health and Medical Administration | Nursing

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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