Quality Improvement Project: A Cardiothoracic Nursing Perspective on Patient Ambulation

Hospitalized patients are a vulnerable population due to their risk for immobility and the consequences that result. Ambulation practice is an important nursing care that can combat this problem, but nurses in the hospital setting commonly miss this practice. This quality improvement project aims to address a cardiothoracic stepdown unit’s nurse ambulation culture through revealing knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of this practice. The influence of an educational intervention was studied by utilizing a pre-existing survey before and after the implementation of a video and poster. The participants for this project were the nurses that staff the cardiothoracic stepdown unit at UNC Medical Center. A member of the unit’s quality improvement team sent the emails and surveys to twenty-five nurses requesting participation for this quality improvement project. The PDSA model (plan, do, study, act) was the format for this project. The project revealed important factors to ambulation practice such as the unit barriers to ambulation and unit strengths that could be targeted for future interventions to further promote ambulation. Although the educational intervention did not show significant changes between the pre-survey and the post-survey, valuable information has been gathered to help understand the cardiothoracic nurses’ role for the unit’s ambulation practice. This project plays an important role in promoting ambulation practice on a unit supporting interventions to improve their ambulation rates among inpatients.Bachelor of Scienc