Quality of nursing care

[lcnursingstudent]

Looking for best practices around the following two questions, thanks:)

Question # 1: Is the amount of paperwork an RN required to do taking away from providing good quality care....what are some ideas to combat this, or does your organization have something in place that helps in this area?

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Question # 2: What are some ways we as nurses can deal with the patient to nurse ratio. It seems each RN is assigned a heavy patient load. I know time managment is a big thing but what are other ideas or suggestions out there so we can still give each patient high quality care?

The single biggest problem with EMR is that none of the deployments that I've thus encountered seem to have given much consideration to the end-user experience, for the nurses or the docs. They're fabulous tools for data gathering and (sometimes) employ top-notch database folks but they're not sold on their usability, they're sold on their 'meaningful-use' compliance and billing tools.

EMR *could* be freaking awesome for the bedside nurses... as it is, though, it seems more of an impediment than a useful implement.