You work in a small, long-term care facility and are often the only

registered nurse working on the unit. Many of your patients have indwelling foley catheters. Recently, several patients have developed bladder infections, after having a unit nosocomial urinary tract infection (UTI) rate of less than 1% for the past year. In fact, the facility has always prided itself on carefully following established evidence-based policies and procedures, both in catheter insertion and in routine catheter care. When you talk to the chief nursing officer about the problem, she asks you to investigate the problem and report back to her. You decide to sit down and make a list of the structure and process indicators you could examine to find the cause of the problem.
 


1. Apply root cause analysis and identify the process and structure variables you could use to determine the cause(s) of the spike in nosocomially acquired UTIs in the facility.


2a. Then develop a quality evaluation plan for one of these variables.
2b. What data will you collect?
2c. What steps will you implement to carry out this quality audit?


3. Include at least two supporting references