QUALITY IMPROVEMENT: IMPLEMENTING NURSE STANDARD WORK IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT FAST-TRACK AREA TO REDUCE PATIENT LENGTH OF STAY

Introduction: The average length of stay of a fast-track area of a large urban hospital was excessively long, which affected the patient experience and the rate at which patients left without being seen. One approach to reducing average length of stay is to create nurse standard work. Nurse standard work was a defined set of process and procedures that reduce variability within a nurse's workflow.Methods: Nurse standard work was created by a team of nurses assisted by management engineering using lean methodology and A3 problem solving. Data were gathered about average length of stay and left without being seen for pa-tients in the emergency department fast-track area of an urban emergency department from October 2018 to June 2020. This period includes 5 months before the intervention start, 4 months during nurse standard work implementation, 9 months using nurse standard work before the unit was repurposed during COVID-19, and 3 months during COVID-19. Results: Nurse standard work helped reduce average length of stay in the emergency department fast-track area from 205 minutes before project initiation to 150.4 minutes in the 7 months after implementing nurse standard work. The time spent walking for supplies was reduced from 422 and 272 seconds before nurse standard work to 25 and 30 seconds for the nurse technician and nurse, respectively, af-ter nurse standard work. Left without being seen was decreased from 4.7% in October of 2018 to 0.7% by March of 2020.Discussion: Nurse standard work reduced the amount of time that nurses spent performing support tasks and reduced delays in providing patient care, which then allowed more time for nurses to interact directly with patients. Nurse stan-dard work provides a clear task sequence that eliminates de-lays in treating patients, but it also allows for fast identification of delays that do occur and simplifies problem solving to eliminate reoccurrence of delays. Therefore, nurse standard work is an essential component of efforts to reduce patient average length of stay in health care processes and reduce left without being seen to the national standard of less than 2%.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the application of nurse standard work in reducing the average length of stay and the rate of patients leaving without being seen in the fast-track area of an emergency department. The results show that nurse standard work efficiently reduces the length of stay and the rate of patients leaving without being seen, allowing more time for direct interaction between nurses and patients.