The ESSAY TASK in 3803NRS
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Word Limit– 2000 words. This means the marker stops marking at 2000 words. If you meet the criteria in less words, then that is great, there is no worries with your essay being shorter. Just make sure you have met the criteria.
Adverse Events & Failure to Rescue
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Question: Do we need to define what failure to rescue is?
Answer: Yes, we have clearly asked for this in the task description and the marking criteria. Failure to Rescue (FTR) is a type of Adverse event in healthcare. Other types include Hospital acquired infections, pressure injuries and medication errors.
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Question: I am not sure what you mean by ‘incidence’ and then the ‘consequences’
Answer: Let’s talk about incidence first. This is where you describe how often adverse events occur in Australian Hospital settings, and who is involved. It is like the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’. You will most likely only find this information about ‘Adverse Events’ in healthcare only as most literature doesn’t separate them into specific types of adverse events. We are asking you to paint a picture here of how big the problem is and who is most at risk.
Now to the consequences of Failure To Rescue: this is the outcome of this event. So, you will find information about increased mortality, increased length of stay and financial burden to name a few (there are more). We have also asked you to include information about the consequences for the significant others/family members and the consequences for the healthcare system.
The Barriers, Strategies, Interprofessional teams & the patient safety elements
A barrier is something that makes it hard or impossible to do something. So here, we are asking for you to identify two barriers that nurses may be faced with and that may prevent them from responding to a deteriorating patient.
This section, items (e), (f) & (g) on the task description, do not need to be addressed in this specific order or as separate items. They will form the most major part of this task and can be addressed together over several paragraphs.
You may choose to identify one barrier, critically evaluate strategy that would address this barrier, link this to interprofessional practice and then describe how this improves or impacts on patient safety. Then, you would repeat this format with your next barrier etc.
Or, you may choose to discuss both barriers together, and then move on to critically evaluating both of your strategies. It is up to you how you address this section.
Don’t forget that your strategies need to be applicable to the interprofessional team, and that this team includes other nurses, doctors, social workers, the patient, the patient’s family, pharmacists, radiographers, surgeons, speech pathologists, dieticians and so on.
An example of a nursing intervention that demonstrates this could be: “the nurse actively encourages the deep breathing and coughing exercises taught to the patient by the Physiotherapist”.
Another example of interprofessional practice is the nursing strategy of checking the 6 rights of medications as this requires the nurse checking the medication order with the Doctor if it is not clear.
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Failure to rescue is described as a cascade of events which includes four key aspects:
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