Sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av att underlätta förbättringsarbete i vården

Sammanfattning: Background: It is required that health care professionals continuously work with patient safety and quality improvements, and the skills of registered nurses are significant in this work. However, quality improvement also requires commitment and knowledge about how to improve health care and ensure patient safety. There is a lack of studies that highlights the importance of supportive functions for this work. Nurses in clinical settings can be utilized as facilitators that make things easier for other health care professionals who are engaged in quality improvement and patient safety. In order to gain understanding about the significance and needs of nurses with a role of facilitator, it is urgent to learn from their experiences of facilitating quality improvement in health care. Aim: The aim was to study nurses’ experiences of facilitating quality improvement of nursing care, patient safety and multi-professional collaboration in health care. Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were performed with ten registered nurses who had experience of being in the role of facilitators. The interviews were analyzed with qualitative content analysis. Findings: In the findings, three main categories (with  a number of subcategories) were identified; raises interest for improvement, leads systematic improvement and facilitates cross-professional collaboration. The underlying meaning of these categories was explored and interpreted into three themes: encouraging others to act rather than doing for others, balancing between following and leading, and being close to reducing the fear of change. Discussion: The interviewed nurses often tended to facilitate multi-professional patient safety work with a focus on checklists, the introduction of procedures for risk assessment and monitoring of adherence to various health and safety regulations. The nurses tended less often to facilitate improvements with a focus on patient and nursing care. Facilitators can make great contributions to the clinical quality improvement work by promote for the teams to reflect on nursing content and quality, and to encourage others to act rather than do for others. Future studies about how appropriate support and enablement from the facilitators can be drafted, and how the actual process of nursing care improvement is done, are suggested.