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Assessment Description
The purpose of this assignment is to determine the role of a project manager for a given case study. Use the “AHRQ Case Studies – Case Studies of Quality Improvement Initiatives” from the AHRQ website located in the Topic 2 topic Resources to complete this assignment. The case studies located in Chapter 8 of the textbook provide additional support for this assignment.  The Role of a Project Manager Essay Example

Select and read a case study from “AHRQ Case Studies – Case Studies of Quality Improvement Initiatives”. Once you have read the case study, in a 500-700-word paper, address the following:

Describe the problem outlined in the case study.
Discuss the project goals.
Describe the role of the project manager addressing the following:
Planning
Organizing
Budgeting
Monitoring progress
Managing reports and documentation
Health care quality and safety initiatives.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

You are required to submit this assignment to Lopes Write. A link to the Lopes Write technical support articles is located in Class Resources if you need assistance.

The Role of a Project Manager

Project managers are in charge of project planning, execution, monitoring, control, and closure. They are in charge of the overall project scope, as well as the project team and resources, the project budget, and the project’s success or failure. The case study chosen for this paper from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) website is that on improving hospital inpatient nursing care. The report tells the story of a big metropolitan medical facility that successfully changed the way its registered nurses, nursing assistants, and other nursing staff provided emotional support to the facility’s adult, medical, and surgical inpatients through an iterative, six-step quality improvement (QI) process. Patients’ ratings of the care they received as inpatients in the hospital in 2003 and 2004–first collected by the National Research Corporation’s Picker Hospital Survey (PHS) and then by the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey (CMS, 2020) – indicate that emotional support needs to be improved. Patient complaint data, monthly reports collected from patients via a series of brief questions regarding their contacts with doctors and nurses, and suggestion boxes at each nursing unit’s desk all corroborated these findings. The yearly assessment on hospitals published by “US News & World Report” also noted a need for reform. This paper looks at the role of the project manager from this context in terms of the functions of a manager.

The Problem and the Project Goals

According to the data, the hospital’s nurses were not providing appropriate emotional support to patients, resulting in a missed chance to give the finest care, improve the patient experience, and maintain the hospital’s competitiveness among similar facilities. The information came from the Picker Hospital Survey (PHS), the hospital’s own QI survey, hospital records of patient complaints, and the yearly hospital rankings published by “US News and World Report.” Emotional support is part of the domains of holistic care which also includes psychological, physical, spiritual, and cultural domains.  The Role of a Project Manager Essay Example

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The project goals in this case were therefore as follows:

1. To empower the nurses and create a psychologically safe working environment through transformational leadership.
2. To put in place systems that would flag deteriorating care quality and ensure that care that is given at all times is safe, effective, efficient, timely, equitable, and patient-centered.

It goes without saying that a nurse who themselves are not emotionally stable due to lack of psychological safety at the workplace cannot offer emotional support to a patient. Therefore, the first step in addressing the problem would be to create a conducive work environment with psychological safety for the nursing workforce in the hospital. This is achieved by exercising transformational leadership by the nurse leaders and the project manager. A transformational leader empowers, facilitates, listens, motivates, and builds confidence (Asiri et al., 2016; Choi et al., 2016).

The Role of the Project Manager

Planning

Planning is a management function that the project manager assumes. Since they are the ones responsible for all aspects of the project, the project manager plans together with the other stakeholders how long the project will take and what it will take to complete the project on time and on budget.

Organizing

Organizing is another function of management that is also the responsibility of the project manager. This function means deciding who does what, why, and when. By organizing, the project manager can ensure that workers can work together to achieve organizational goals thanks to the process of creating worker relationships. Following the creation of a plan or strategy, a manager must organize her team and resources in accordance with the plan. Two fundamental aspects of organization are assigning labor and granting authority.

Budgeting

All projects have a finite and definite budget. Resources are always scarce i all organizations. For this reason, the other role of the project manager is to ensure that they have sat down with stakeholders and come up with a workable and feasible budget for the project. This may include costs related to training, upskilling, or purchase of enabling technologies.

Monitoring Process

Once the project has started, there is need for the progress to be monitored by the project manager to ensure that it does not go off the rails or deviate from the initial plan or roadmap. Monitoring has to be proactive and never reactive.

Managing Reports and Documentation

Every project will require the generation of reports by the various workers actually implementing it. For this to happen correctly and for it to reflect the actual situation on the ground, there must be accurate and consistent documentation. This means that the project manager has to make this known to all the project employees with regard to what is expected of them.

Healthcare Quality and Safety Initiatives

Lastly but not least, the project manager is responsible for ensuring that the healthcare quality is upheld and that safety initiatives are routine within the organization. This means that they must always insist that staff use evidence-based practice (EBP) at all times. EBP is best practice and makes use of only those interventions that have been backed for efficacy by scholarly scientific peer-reviewed literature that is also current (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2019).   

References

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ] (2020). Case studies of quality improvement initiatives. https://www.ahrq.gov/cahps/quality-improvement/reports-and-case-studies/Case-Study_QI-Initiatives.html

Asiri, S.A., Rohrer, W.W., Al-Surimi, K., Da’ar, O.O., & Ahmed, A. (2016). The association of leadership styles and empowerment with nurses’ organizational commitment in an acute health care setting: A cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing, 15(38), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-016-0161-7

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] (2020). HCAHPS overview. https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HospitalQualityInits/HospitalHCAHPS

Choi, S.L., Goh, C.F., Adam, M.B.H., & Tan, O.K. (2016). Transformational leadership, empowerment, and job satisfaction: The mediating role of employee empowerment. Human Resources for Health, 14(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-016-0171-2

Melnyk, B.M., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (2019). Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice, 4^th ed. Wolters Kluwer.  The Role of a Project Manager Essay Example