The topic my group chose for our proposal is the effect of reducing call bell wait times on patient outcomes. After researching my topic, I discovered how relevant call bell wait times are especially now due to staff shortages. Call bell wait times are a sensitive subject because nurse’s and other healthcare professionals are not ignoring the patient’s needs but when it gets mentioned it sometimes comes across that is what people are thinking. I discovered that longer call bell wait times can lead to falls and more injuries such as pressure injuries. I also found out that studies have shown that call bell wait times play a role in patient satisfaction. These findings make sense to me because I know if I were a patient, and someone didn’t come to help me for a long time I would try and do whatever I needed help with myself. This would then possibly lead to further injury such as a fall. Also, if a survey were to come out and ask how my hospital stay was, I would not want to give a good review if I was constantly waiting a long time for someone to come help me when my call light was on. However, being on the other side of the call bell light I know how hard it can be to try and answer a bunch of patient’s call bells when there is only one of you and so many of them especially when the floor is already short staffed.
The literature review didn’t change my assumptions about the topic much however, it did bring different perspectives to light. The literature review also made me realize that many studies done regarding this topic are old and there are not too many new research articles regarding this topic. It made me think if it has something to do with the COVID-19 pandemic or if people just haven’t been researching the topic as much anymore. My team had to minimally revise our proposal due to the sensitivity of the topic and how we did not want it to come across as though nurses were just ignoring call bell lights because we know that is not the case. During the research process we noticed that many of the literature was outdated so we made changes where we needed to, to accommodate that.
Our findings will impact our future nursing practice because the staffing shortage is not going to be fixed by the time, we are all nurses in less than a year. However, ways to reduce call bell wait times may be implemented on the unit I end up working on or on most floors by then, but the exact future is hard to determine. The patient’s satisfaction due to call bell wait times will affect my role as a nurse because if patients are not happy and leave bad reviews then that reflects poorly on the hospital and us as nurses. This will most likely cause more stress on the nurses to answer call bells quickly due to people higher up wanting better patient satisfaction reviews. Also, as a nurse you don’t want your patient to be injured further so you want to do everything you can to prevent further injuries such as falls due to call bell wait times. I think call bell wait times are not something that can be a quick easy fix but there are potential solutions to help alleviate some of the stress related to call bell wait times.
My team and I hit some barriers when it came to our proposal due to outside sources not getting information back to us, but we overcame those barriers with some help. We also worked together to try and come up with solutions when things didn’t seem to be working well with our proposal. We started the proposal with our draft needing significant revisions and there were some miscommunications along the way and some technological difficulties but in the end we all communicated and fixed the issues that arose throughout the process. We got feedback where we could, and we incorporated it into our final proposal. Overall, I think we worked well together to compile information and put together the final proposal despite the barriers we faced.
