Impacts on future outcomes. The outcomes will enhance the nurses’ future skills, knowledge, and practice, and enhance the ability of the nurse to provide quality care while maintaining …show more content…
Research literature indicates the importance of keeping the high-risk patient safe to prevent suicide and self-harm. One way to keep the patient safe is placing the patient on a twenty-four-hour monitoring schedule. It is the responsibility of the healthcare staff to monitor and safely care for the suicidal patient (Schmidt & Ivanoff, 2014). It was also found that 85 suicides a year reported as a sentinel event occurred within a healthcare facility. The Joint Commission (2017) has recommended detecting and correcting environment risk in the healthcare setting for a safer environment to help prevent suicide. The first priority for the behavioral health patient population is safety. One way to meet the safety needs of the patient is constant observation. Sitters are usually used to observe the patient and keep the patient safe (Rape, Mann, Schooley, & Ramey, 2015). When the nurse is unaware of the role she plays in keeping the suicidal patient safe the nurse is unable to provide the sitter with the guidance and education needed to keep the patient safe (Evans, 2016). Best practice requires the nurse to know her role and the sitter’s role. Nurse’s should know the hospital guidelines, policies and procedures (Rape, Mann, Schooley, & Ramey, 2015). The supporting evidence from the research literature addressed the identified gap which included normalized deviation from RN to RN and the RN unaware of certain safety requirements causing lack of enforcement. The gap also included the RN caring for the patient lack’s knowledge of known best practice, therefore, overlooks the sitters’ lack of compliance with maintaining patients’ safety. To deliver optimal care and support the safety of the patient the RN needs to