Developing an Evaluation Plan and Disseminating Evidence

Developing an Evaluation Plan and Disseminating Evidence
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Evaluation Plan
The evaluation of this project will require a full-time assessment team that will lead the development and execution of a comprehensive project evaluation (Brim & Schoonover, 2014). The purpose of the evaluation is to focus on the impact of the new plan intended to reduce nurse turnover, improve job satisfaction, and positively impact the overall delivery of care. The proposed plan involves periodic training of the nurses’ staff, hiring more nurses, and bringing on board a break nurse and a resource nurse (Boyle, 2011). The evaluation purposes to ensure that the proposed plan accomplishes proposed output and outcome measurements (CDC, 2011). The results of this assessment will be shared with the nursing staff, the program management staff, and all the health workers community within the hospital to assist with future planning and continuous improvement efforts.
The evaluation will address the following key questions:
• Does the new plan result in low nurse turnover rate within the hospital?
• Does the program lead to improved nursing staff job satisfaction?
• Are the improvements in job satisfaction positively influence the overall delivery of care?
Method
The assessment team will conduct a pre and post participant survey to evaluate the new program (CDC, 2011). A staff of 25 nurses will complete a member survey that evaluates their attitudes and contributions to job satisfaction and dissatisfaction before the initiation of change and after initiating change. The stakeholders such as the HR manager, CEO, CNO, and DOU and ICU director will also complete the participant survey. The survey research would enable the organization to measure the need for the proposed solution (Training nurses on how to cope with CF and taking care of the nurses’ well-being by the administration) and the usefulness of the new plan.
The evaluation team will also obtain turnover rates before and after the initiation of the new program. They will acquire this data from the human resource department database, which stores all information concerning the organization’s incoming and outgoing employees. In addition, the team will compare patient discharge surveys before and after the initiation of the plan. The patient discharge surveys would enable them to determine if the new program has resulted in improved care delivery or not.
Variables
A variable is anything that varies; something that can change, for example weight, height, idea, anxiety levels among others (Kaur, 2013). The variables that the evaluation team will assess when evaluating project outcomes include staff attitudes and perceptions, patient attitudes and perceptions, and the rate of nursing staff turnover. The nursing staff is an important variable because they are the primary care providers who get in contact with the patients most of the times, and their well-being greatly influences patient outcomes. Patient attitudes and perceptions are also critical factors in the evaluation process, as they are the benchmarks from which the assessment team measures the quality of care delivery. The rate of nursing staff turnover is a variable that largely depends on the job satisfaction and dissatisfaction of nurses.
Tools Necessary to Educate Project Participants
The first tool is PowerPoint projection; all the components of the project will be summarized and prepared in PowerPoint slides to facilitate the teaching of the plan participants. Educating the nurses’ staff on the significance of the proposed solution is vital and it helps them to prepare for the change. PowerPoint slides will contain all the information about the project including the problem, proposed solution plan, implementation methods, evaluation methods, and the significance of the proposed program. It will also contain teaching information on how to prevent Compassion Fatigue. Presentation of the PowerPoint will occur during meetings, conferences, and forums with the project participants.
Another tool necessary to educate project participants are the teaching materials, including writing pads, pens, flyers or brochures, and pamphlets. The flyers or brochures will have an outline of all the components of the new program. It will provide a quick way to scan through the project’s packages, which they would be able to read in detail from the pamphlets. The writing pads and pens will be useful during the teaching-learning process of the participants to note down any points needing further explanations or for future references.
Tools Necessary to Evaluate Project’s Outcomes
The evaluation team will use survey and questionnaires to analyze the project’s results. The participants of the project including the nurses’ staff and key stakeholders will complete an anonymous survey at two intervals. The first one will be done before the initiation of the program; it will aim at finding the level of dissatisfaction among the nurses and its causes, and the second survey will be done six months after the implementation to determine if the proposed solution is yielding any positive results. The survey responses will be anonymous, and the data will be reported in aggregate.
Each project’s participant will receive a copy of a nursing workplace questionnaire that the evaluation team will use in identifying the satisfaction of the staff in the ICU and DOU. The cover sheet of the questionnaire would indicate that the answers to the individual survey would remain anonymous, the results would be shared with all stakeholders and nurses, and thank all the participants for completing the questionnaire.
Data Analysis
The team will use a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software to analyze the output and outcome data from the survey (Arkkelin, 2014). The analysis may take around one month to allow time to fully explore, analyze, interpret the data, and make conclusions. The interpretation of data will be done according to the goals of the projects and the needs of the stakeholders. Furthermore, the evaluation team would provide time for the stakeholders to review the results to ensure its transparency and validity.
Disseminating Evidence
Dissemination refers to the distribution of knowledge and intervention materials to a specific nursing practice audience or key stakeholders (AHRQ, 2012; WHO, 2014). Dissemination of evidence usually aims at increasing the reach of evidence and increasing people’s motivation and ability to apply the evidence.
Disseminating Evidence to Key Stakeholders
The evaluation results would reach the key stakeholders via various dissemination methods. These include written information/ briefing documents, success stories and person-to-person contact meetings (Stassen, Doherty & Poe, 2015). Written information will include publications of full executive summary reports of the project’s goals and objectives. There will be monthly person-to-person meetings with the program implementation team, program stakeholders, and funding decision-makers team to inform them about what is working well and what requires adjustment during the initiation process (Neta et al., 2015). Before these monthly meetings, every key stakeholder would be given a written summary report of the evaluation results to go through and note any areas that require further explanations or suggestions during the meetings. These dissemination strategies will be within the available budget and time friendly, as the research team will be able to meet the stakeholders and discuss the evaluation results face to face.
Disseminating the Significance of the Project’s Outcome to the Nursing Community
According to Friedrich, Hoffmann, and Bauer (2015), posters are easy to construct and to spread information. Therefore, the team will use them to spread the importance of the project’s outcome to the nursing community and other health care professionals. The advantages of using posters are that they will provide up-to-the-minute information to nurses and inform them of the survey outcomes, findings and a...