title: Nursing: key to quality improvement.
abstract: Nurses and effective nursing care contribute to quality patient outcomes. This article explains in detail the importance of nursing care in the quality agenda and explores the existing gaps in this field of science. Key stakeholders and groups that advocate and focus on specific quality agendas within the field of pediatrics are briefly described. Pediatric health care uses a multidisciplinary model of delivery; each discipline uses specific domains of knowledge and interventions, making it difficult to separate them when evaluating patient outcomes. Much work needs to be conducted using health services research approaches that link and partition the overall and combined contribution of discipline-specific providers.
authors: Bi-State Nursing Workforce Innovation Center, UMKC School of Nursing, 2464 Charlotte Street, Room 3413, Kansas City, MO 64108, USA. srlacey@cmh.edu
authors: Susan R
authors: SR
authors: Lacey
authors: Karen S
authors: KS
authors: Cox
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D004506:Education, Nursing; D006280:Health Workforce; D006776:Hospitals, Pediatric / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D008008:Licensure, Nursing; D024802:Nurse's Role; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D015399:Nursing Research; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D010348:Patient Care Team / Q000592:standards*; D010371:Pediatric Nursing / Q000592:standards*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000592:standards; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D014481:United States