Improve MUST score completion on Guiting by 20% by April 2018

Quality Improvement Poster Download

Background & Problem

Guiting ward is a 34 bedded surgical ward specialising in vascular. This means the majority of patients have a chronic disease underlying their acute admission, and it has been found that chronic disease is one of the high risk groups of patients at risk of malnutrition.

All of the nursing staff on the ward got involved in the project.

MUST scores should be recorded within 6 hours of their admission to the hospital, this is not being done, not only is good nutrition needed to promote wound healing it can also have an impact on length of stay and the risk of developing a hospital acquired pressure sore.

Aim

The aim of this project is to improve MUST score completion on admission to the ward by 20% between Nov 2017 and April 2018.

Method

PDSA 1 – establish a ward team to help lead on the project
PDSA 2 – getting sit on scales fixed
PDSA 3 – discussing with all of the ward team about the project

Audits of the paperwork were done weekly, to establish % of MUST scores completed.

Results

Initial baseline audit was poor, but following the engagement of all of the nursing staff there was a dramatic improvement. The last audit showing 100% compliance.

Implications

Need to continue keeping the message out there to all ward staff. Need to set up the MUST information board, which will hopefully make accessing the calculations for some of our patients easy and quick to access.