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Help with a quality improvement project

By Therese Carlson posted 02-02-2010 02:43 PM

  
I am a nursing supervisor for a transitional housing program.  We have entered a quality improvement competition that focuses on integrating physical and mental health.  I am also new to this whole social networking world.  I would like to hear from others who have implemented measures to improve the physical health and awareness of physical health by consumers in their programs.  I would like to hear about successful and unsuccessful approaches and any anecdotal comments you can provide.  We are looking for direction in determining our actual project and research to backup our hypotheses.  We also have no budget and limited time to pull this together.  Our license to operate does not allow for any hands on care, so obtaining glucometers for blood sugar monitoring is not an option because I am not allowed to do that here.  My staff is all entry level BA in psychology, so I also have to train them in anything we do.
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Debi Schuhow
03-17-2010 05:28 PM

I like the use of the "Motivational Interviewing" concept and techniques that can help your staff to talk to the patients about things they can do to improve their physical health. It is one thing to say "You should brush your teeth after every meal and before you go to bed" and think that you are done. Or to find out if the patient is even motivated to brush their teeth, what are the barriers to brushing their teeth, and how you can move them along the continuum of behavior change. Perhaps ypou can use that as a framework for your project, it only requires staff training, check out the book "Lifestyle Change" by Chris Dunn and Stephen Rollnick--it gives good examples of motivational interviewing questions.

Rita Mack
03-07-2010 09:40 PM

During my CNS Clinical at a community mental health Center vlients frequently had question related to their heath and would ask me during the morning community meeting. At the suggestion of my instructor I began doing brief teaching on healht topics at the end of each meeting. Topics included WHY regular oral care was important and how to find a dentist you could talk to, benefits of exercise and suggestions of ways to add exercise to your daily routine, sleep hygiene, diet topics such as how to get more calcium in your diet, and others. A couple times when the weather was nice a small group of us took a walk around the block as a group "mini exercise". The clients" questions triggered the topics and they reported they found them helpful. They were eager for the information as many didn't see medical doctors as regularly as was ideal and often they felt too rushed by their doctor to ask questions or didn't know where to go for answers to their questions.

Robert Abel
02-25-2010 04:12 PM

The Lilly company (pharmaceuticals)has wonderful free training modality tools that staff can use and teach (and learn) wellness approaches in many areas including physical wellness strategies ....look up the website....lilly.org
Bob Abel

Ashley Altman
02-07-2010 10:29 AM

Why don't you look at smoking cessation? It's so vitally important and there's a ton of research out there to support any interventions. Of course, this would only apply to clients who smoke, but unfortunately, that is usually a large majority.
Another interesting thing to look at is exercise. There's some psych nursing research out there about implementing creative exercise programs for people with mental illness -- it helps to improve their social skills as well as their physical health. Even if people already exercise, they can still participate because it applies to everyone.