Nursing Quality Improvement Program

AIHA selected four leading medical establishments in Armenia and Russia — Erebouni Medical Center and St. Grigor Lusavorich Medical Center in Yerevan, Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, and Sokolov Medical Center in St. Petersburg — to replicate quality standards of the ANNC accreditation program for nursing care excellence.

Each Eurasian hospital was paired with a U.S. hospital that has been acknowledged as a center of nursing excellence through the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Magnet Recognition Program.

The increased role nurses began playing in patient care at the four hospitals as a result of the project was evident in the number of new initiatives to restore patient privacy and improve quality of care spearheaded by the nursing staff.

One of these initiatives at Erebouni Medical Center involved designing and sewing curtains to separate patients in admissions areas and intensive care units modeled on privacy curtains observed by the nurses during their visits to North Shore University Hospital.

Another was the installation of electronic physician call systems in ICUs so that nurses do not have to leave the patient’s side during emergency situations to fetch a physician as they had previously done.

Other initiatives worth mentioning include the introduction of mandatory reporting forms for monitoring both patient complications and cases that required the use of physical restraints; the latter was reported to significantly reduce the instances of such restraints.

The result of these and other innovations that the Russian and Armenian nurses reported was most rewarding for them was the positive response of physicians at their respective institutions who — having observed the increased contributions nurses made toward improved patient care — began seeing them as equal professional partners.