Quality management in nursing.

Nursing care is the number one criterion patients use to measure the quality of care at hospitals. With the trend toward a more integrated institutionwide approach to quality, nursing must adapt its traditional approach to complement an institutionwide quality management strategy. Although written standards have been the cornerstone of nursing quality management, they have not always stood up to objective measurement techniques. Only recently has nursing been using automated data for measuring nursing quality. This article provides an example of how nursing can use automated data to measure and manage the quality of nursing services.