Enhancing Care for Psychiatric Patients Boarding in the Emergency Department

Psychiatric boarding in the emergency department has become a common phenomenon in emergency departments throughout the United States. The purpose of this DNP Scholarly Project was to create a quality improvement project to enhance the care that psychiatric patients receive while they are boarding in the emergency department (ED). This quality improvement project consisted of an educational PowerPoint module for ED nursing staff and the dissemination of a care plan that nursing staff utilized while caring for psychiatric patients in this specific ED. The target population for this scholarly project was emergency department nursing personnel in a 40-bed metropolitan ED. Data was collected using a pre-intervention and post-intervention survey and the completion of retrospective chart audits. SPSS software was used to analyze the data collected to evaluate the results of the pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys and to analyze the boarding times obtained from the chart audits to evaluate if the care for psychiatric patients was enhanced with statistical significance.