AORN accepted as member
Of National Quality Forum
AORN received formal acknowledgement Aug. 23 that its application to join the National Quality Forum (NQF) coalition of healthcare and community leaders has been approved.“Membership in the NQF will broaden opportunities for AORN to participate with other professional organizations and consumers in developing the standards and sound public policies needed to improve the quality of care we deliver to patients in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers,” said Mary Jo Steiert, RN, BSN, CNOR, the association’s president.
The more than 330 member organizations of NQF all get “a seat at the table” in developing voluntary national consensus quality standards. As an NQF member, AORN elected officials, professional staff and member experts will join with other key public- and private-sector leaders in setting national priorities and goals to achieve the aim of the Institute of Medicine—health care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient and equitable.
AORN will nominate members to participate in steering committees and advisory panels that help guide standards development. Access to an NQF members-only Web site will enable the association to monitor ongoing projects, vote on proposed consensus quality standards and obtain discounts on orders of consensus standard reports. Members also get advance registration privileges for NQF workshops, symposia and the NQF National Policy Conference on Quality in the fall and the NQF Quality Implementation Conference in the spring.
AORN has been at the forefront of several initiatives to improve surgical patient safety and quality of care. Its Recommended Practices and guidelines set the standard for safe care in the perioperative suites, and its annual promotion of National Time Out Day has helped focus attention nationwide on standardized presurgical safety checks needed to reduce wrong-patient, wrong-procedure and other surgical errors. AORN also has developed the Perioperative Nursing Data Set (PNDS) to provide a standardized nomenclature for documentation, data collection and analysis of clinical practice.
To help guide clinical practice, AORN has established collaborative partnerships with The Joint Commission, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
“Historically, AORN has been responsible for developing the practice standards that guide the delivery of safe, quality care to patients requiring invasive procedures,” noted Linda K. Groah, RN, MSN, CNOR, CNAA, FAAN, AORN’s executive director. “Formally joining NQF will give us a much stronger voice. Many third-party payers and regulators rely on the NQF to set the standards that determine the desired outcomes of care,” Groah said.
NQF has led the effort to achieve a national consensus on a comprehensive set of standards for the public reporting of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) data. HAIs account for an estimated 90,000 deaths and add an estimated $4.5 billion to $5.7 billion in annual healthcare costs. Since 2004, NQF has been in the vanguard of a national consensus drive to develop standards for ambulatory care quality measurement and reporting.
In 2004, NQF endorsed an initial set of 15 performance measures to evaluate the quality of nursing care, and in a follow-up effort funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will establish a tracking system to capture and report adoption and use of the NQF-endorsed standards. NQF also has ongoing projects seeking consensus on a comprehensive framework for therapeutic drug management, evidence-based practices for treating substance-use disorders and a national framework and preferred practices for palliative and hospice care.
