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How to effectively present staffing data

Nurse Leader Weekly, March 22, 2004

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Data have a powerful impact only if presented effectively. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' (JCAHO) staffing effectiveness standard requires that in addition to collecting data and analyzing its effects on patient outcomes, you report your results to hospital leaders.

What is the best way to present your data? How can you most effectively help administration understand the impact of your data and how you use it to improve patient outcomes?

Perhaps you have compiled extensive pen-and-paper data and entered it into a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet might be an effective way to organize your data, but it is probably not the best way to present data to persons other than those who were actually involved in the data collection process.

You will most likely have large amounts of data to present. When summarizing this much data, a graphic presentation may highlight significant features that are not readily observable in a spreadsheet's column of numbers. As you make a decision about the best means to present your staffing analysis data, consider your audience.

Potential audiences include JCAHO surveyors, hospital leadership, quality improvement committees, staff nurses, boards of directors or trustees, and state regulatory bodies. Take steps to ensure that your presentation focuses on indicators for which that particular audience is most interested. Perhaps you are trying to improve staff performance by showing staff members of the respiratory care unit an association between skill mix and patient complaints. In this case, your presentation should concentrate on data for that unit.

When presenting data to JCAHO surveyors, highlight your analysis, relationships between trends and staffing, corrective actions taken, and the effectiveness of such actions. Remember that JCAHO's standards are not prescriptive. They do not dictate what data to collect, how it should be analyzed, or what you should do about the results. They need to see that you are assessing staffing effectiveness in terms of its impact on patient safety and patient outcomes. You must be able to demonstrate through leadership and staff interviews that the effectiveness of your staffing system is of primary importance to your facility.

There are various types of graphic presentations to choose, when selecting the type you want to use, be sure that the graphics meet the following four requirements:

· Do not misrepresent or distort the data that you present. For example, do not base your presentation on limited data. Data pertaining to only a selected area is a misrepresentation.

· Do not sidetrack your audience with irrelevant information. Do not go into detail about how you created your graphics for your presentation. Use the time you have to focus on the data and how that data relate to staffing effectiveness.

· Whenever possible, present data in a way that encourages comparison of different data sets.

· Provide a brief, concise description of the measures you are using prior to introducing a graph illustrating a particular staffing effectiveness relationship. This will help your audience to focus on the results that you present rather than definitional details.

Three of the most common graphs are bar charts, histograms, and x-y plots. A combination of these graphs is the best way to introduce various data pieces before presenting the final relationship between staffing and clinical assessment in an x-y plot.

Source: Excerpted from Staffing Analyzer: Simplifying Data for Nurse Managers, http://www.hcmarketplace.com

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