The topic that my team chose to do was unnecessary prolonged hospital stays. We chose this topic because the floor that we have our clinical on has some patients that have been there for over 100 days, which is clearly a problem. When first starting this project, I knew that prolonged patients stay could be caused by nursing staff shortage or because the hospital couldn’t find placement for the patient after discharge. Our group went on to find the physical and emotional effects that prolonged patient stay has on the hospital, staff, and patients.

After gathering all the information from articles, it was found that prolonged patient stay has an impact on the care provided. The patients feel that nurses provide better care to the preferred patients because they have more needs. Once we found information from the articles, we interviewed nurses on R2 to gather their feelings and thoughts about prolonged patient stay. We wanted to do this to be able to inform other floors that may have this problem on how to deal with it and provide the same care to all patients. We did have to revise our evaluation plan to measure the nurses the attitudes instead of having a specific time frame. We hope that our findings help to guide nurses and inform them on providing safe and appropriate care to all patients.

Our team worked well together, and we were able to be successful when it came to completing this project. We all gathered information to be able to use in our interview to make sure that it went smoothly. Our team did not run into many challenges because we all communicated about changes that need to be made or something that we thought might not work. I think that it was helpful that we all sat down once a week and worked on this together because this way we were all on the same page. I think that since we all communicated effectively and work together is what made us successful in finishing this project.