Human Papillomavirus Vaccinations - Summary

Elizabeth Long

Stakeholders

The safety, efficacy, complications, and importance of the Human Papillomavirus vaccination dictates the stakeholders within this project and ensures continued and future success. The stakeholders are identified as the patients and parents or caregivers of adolescents ages nine through seventeen. Other essential shareholders are the owner and director of Family Express Clinic in Conroe, nurse practitioner, medical assistance and the school nurse leader at Oakridge High School who aligned together, collaborated and approved the capstone project to increase HPV vaccination compliance at this clinic.

Loosely defined, a stakeholder is a person or group of individuals who can affect or be affected by a given project. Stakeholders can be individuals working on a project, groups of people or organizations, or even segments of a population. A stakeholder may be actively involved in a project's work, affected by the project's outcome, or able to influence the project's success. Stakeholders can be an internal part of a project's organization, or external, such as customers, creditors, unions, or members of a community (Project management, 2013).

The second nurse practitioner at the Spring location at Family Express Clinic is identified as a staff that can be converted as a champion. The Project Champion's involvement in the project (other than moral support) is solely limited to receiving (note the word receiving, the Project Manager provides the Project Champion with feedback, it is not the responsibility of the Project Champion to ask for feedback) feedback from the Project Manager about the problems that the project and/or the project team is facing, and escalating the feedback to the stakeholders along with suggested solutions to ensure a smooth project (Project management, 2013).

Resources, Barriers, and Facilitators

Utilizing a SWOT analysis helped to analyze the issues faced at Express Family Clinic. Some advantages found at this clinic was that the low rates of the human papillomavirus are universal and not just singled to this clinic. The clinic offer government aids to help underprivileged pay for the vaccination. The patients have been seen by the medical assistant for immunizations which shorten wait time and increase immunization compliance.

Some of the takeaways from this flowchart in finding threats at Express Family Clinic are low staff compliance and accountability, on flagging the patient's charts, creating weekly reports and mandated staff meetings on patient education and follow-up scheduling. The medical assistance rushes through immunizations and often don't provide pamphlets or handouts to initiate the discussion on HPV and direct the nurse practitioner to educate and address questions. The clinic does not have a policy or follow-up reminders in place regarding subsequent series of 2^nd and 3^rd HPV vaccination dosing. The second greatest threat is the compliance of the patient for subsequent doses and decreased risk of HPV infections and cancer. A single way to mitigate these risks is to educate the staff at Express Family Clinic. Thereby, increasing current statistics, compliance rates, the importance of HPV education to patients and caregivers, implementation training while improving evidence-based facility protocols and patient outcomes.

Lewin Change Theory

The change theory model for this Capstone project is the Lewin three-stage model of change known as unfreezing-change-refreeze that requires prior learning to be rejected and replaced (Cohen,1992). The theory creates awareness of why providing education to patients and their caregivers are the key to HPV vaccination success. The theory implicates a process called unfreezing that helps staff and patients let go of patterns that are counterproductive. The three-stage model is productive for not only the staff but also patients and caregivers at the clinic. During the change stage, the thought process changes and the negative action is fleeting which affects behaviors towards a decisive intervention. Finally, the refreezing stage is accepted as a new habit, and the action is implicated, and the evidence-based practice intervention becomes the new operating procedure. Without this step, the staff and patients can go back to old habits.

References

What is a Stakeholder? - Project management. (2013). Retrieved from

http://www.projectmanagementdocs.com/blog/what-is-a-stakeholder.html

J. Cohen, "A power primer," Psychological Bulletin, vol. 112, no. 1, pp. 155-159, 1992.