Designing a standardised emergency nurse career pathway for use across rural, regional and metropolitan New South Wales, Australia: A consensus process.

BACKGROUND: Emergency nurses are the first clinicians to see patients in the ED; their practice is fundamental to patient safety. To reduce clinical variation and increase the safety and quality of emergency nursing care, we developed a standardised consensus-based emergency nurse career pathway for use across Australian rural, regional, and metropolitan New South Wales (NSW) emergency departments. METHODS: An analysis of career pathways from six health services, the College for Emergency Nursing Australasia, and NSW Ministry of Health was conducted. Using a consensus process, a 15-member expert panel developed the pathway and determined the education needs for pathway progression over six face-to-face meetings from May to August 2023. RESULTS: An eight-step pathway outlining nurse progression through models of care related to different ED clinical areas with a minimum 172 h protected face-to-face and 8 h online education is required to progress from novice to expert. Progression corresponds with increasing levels of complexity, decision making and clinical skills, aligned with Benner's novice to expert theory. CONCLUSION: A standardised career pathway with minimum 180 h would enable a consistent approach to emergency nursing training and enable nurses to work to their full scope of practice. This will facilitate transferability of emergency nursing skills across jurisdictions.

Impact of an emergency department rapid response system on inpatient clinical deterioration: A controlled pre-post study.

AIM: To determine the impact implementation of Emergency Department Clinical Emergency Response System (EDCERS) on inpatient deterioration events and identify contributing causal factors. METHODS: EDCERS was implemented in an Australian regional hospital, integrating a single parameter track and trigger criteria for escalation of care, and emergency, specialty and critical care clinician response to patient deterioration. In this controlled pre-post study, electronic medical records of patients who experienced a deterioration event (rapid response call, cardiac arrest or unplanned intensive care admission) on the ward within 72 h of admission from the emergency department (ED) were reviewed. Causal factors contributing to the deteriorating event were assessed using a validated human factors framework. RESULTS: Implementation of EDCERS reduced the number of inpatient deterioration events within 72 h of emergency admission with failure or delayed response to ED patient deterioration as a causal factor. There was no change in the overall rate of inpatient deterioration events. CONCLUSION: This study supports wider implementation of rapid response systems in the ED to improve management of deteriorating patients. Tailored implementation strategies should be used to achieve successful and sustainable uptake of ED rapid response systems and improve outcomes in deteriorating patients.

Increasing accuracy in documentation through the application of a structured emergency nursing framework: A multisite quasi-experimental study.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To determine if the use of an emergency nursing framework improves the accuracy of clinical documentation. BACKGROUND: Accurate clinical documentation is a nursing professional responsibility essential for high-quality and safe patient care. The use of the emergency nursing framework "HIRAID" (History, Identify Red flags, Assessment, Interventions, Diagnostics, reassessment and communication) improves emergency nursing care by reducing treatment delays and improving escalation of clinical deterioration. The effect of HIRAID on the accuracy of nursing documentation is unknown. DESIGN: A quasi-experimental pre-post study was conducted and the report was guided by the strengthening the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology (STROBE) checklist. METHODS: HIRAID was implemented in four regional/rural Australian emergency departments (ED) using a range of behaviour change strategies. The blinded electronic healthcare records of 120 patients with a presenting problem of shortness of breath, abdominal pain or fever were reviewed. Quantity measures of completeness and qualitative measures of completeness and linguistic correctness of documentation adapted from the D-Catch tool were used to assess accuracy. Differences between pre-post groups were analysed using Wilcoxon rank-sum and two-sample t-tests for continuous variables. Pearson's Chi-square and Fisher exact tests were used for the categorical data. RESULTS: The number of records containing the essential assessment components of emergency care increased significantly from pre- to post-implementation of HIRAID. This overall improvement was demonstrated in both paediatric and adult populations and for all presentation types. Both the quantitative and qualitative measures of documentation on patient history and physical assessment findings improved significantly. CONCLUSION: Use of HIRAID improves the accuracy of clinical documentation of the patient history and physical assessment in both adult and paediatric populations. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The emergency nursing framework "HIRAID" is recommended for use in clinical practice to increase the documentation accuracy performed by emergency nurses.