The practice of nursing involves several critical components that enhance interprofessional team support to improve the quality of care and patient safety. I work in a nursing home setting. In a nursing home, older adults with at least one chronic medical condition are cared for long-term to manage their health conditions, improve quality of life, and reduce morbidity and mortality. In the nursing home setting, there is an interprofessional team made up of nurses, specialist nurses, doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and social workers. The patients’ families are also part of the team as they help in improving patient satisfaction with care, and their engagement with care providers helps determine patient outcomes and safety. In the nursing home setting, the team function that needs to be improved is interprofessional communication. In a nursing home setting, a nurse plays a critical role in providing care to the patients, advocating for patients, and linking them to other interdisciplinary teams. As a nurse practitioner working in a nursing home, it is critical to apply iCARE components, including compassion, advocacy, resilience, and evidence-based practices (EBP), through interprofessional team support to achieve desired patient outcomes.
Compassion
Nurses play a critical role in providing compassionate care. Compassionate care involves recognition and empathetic understanding of patients’ emotional needs, such as pain, suffering, and distress. Nurses know their patients well, including their medical diagnoses, family background, social situations, and psychological and physical needs. Therefore, as a nursing practitioner in a nursing home, I could promote this attribute of iCARE by involving patients and their families in shared decision-making that promotes the personal, psychological, and social needs of each patient. This strategy would involve other care providers such as doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and social workers working collaboratively through open communication to identify patients’ needs and work towards achieving compassionate care.
The nursing home culture will change drastically after integrating compassionate care into patient care. Interprofessional care providers will meet regularly to discuss compassionate care and how they can achieve it in the care setting. As a result of integrating compassionate care into the nursing home setting, patient outcomes will improve because the involvement of all care providers and patients and their families enhances better results.
Advocacy
Advocacy is one of the critical roles that a nurse practitioner plays in any nursing setting (Novinmehr et al., 2019). Patient advocacy involves identifying patient’s needs and the implementation of solutions to address those needs. Nurses should work with other care providers to ensure that patient needs and rights are heard and met to improve patient satisfaction with care and outcomes. Advocacy also involves actions that empower patients to reduce their dependence on other people (Novinmehr et al., 2019).
In the nursing home setting, nurses can encourage patient advocacy through patient education. Patient education will help improve patients’ self-advocacy and empower them to take care of their illnesses and manage symptoms as a way of improving care outcomes. The nurse can collaborate with other care providers in the nursing home facility to educate patients on issues such as medication management, symptom recognition, change of risky behaviors, and self-care, among others. This collaboration between care providers and patients and their families will result in culture change in the nursing home facility because patient needs will be prioritized before anything else. As a result, patient outcomes will improve significantly because they are aware of their medical conditions and become part of intervention procedures.
Resilience
Nurses face numerous challenges when working in nursing settings. For instance, watching patients suffer in pain can trigger psychological problems such as anxiety, fear, and depression. In nursing home settings, nurses experience trauma and death anxiety due to first-hand experience of a patient’s death (Conejero et al., 2023). Therefore, for them to provide adequate and quality care, they should practice resilience. Resilience is the ability to remain calm and strong in the face of adversity. In a nursing home setting, where patients have at least one chronic condition, patient suffering is immense, and thus, nurses in such settings should practice resilience to overcome those challenges and continue being present to the patients and their families to provide the care that is needed.
Care providers in the nursing home can form support groups that help them share their experiences and how the workplace is affecting them psychologically. Through such teams, open communication can play a critical role in sharing experiences and finding solutions to help care providers cope. The formation of local support teams will lead to organizational cultural change because such teams will become part of the nursing home to help care providers cope with the death and suffering of their patients. Forming support teams will help care providers cope with challenges in the nursing home effectively and thus will be able to provide much-needed care in a challenging setting. As a result, patient outcomes will improve because care providers are psychologically prepared to handle all cases and remain strong to encourage the patients and their families.
Evidence-Based Practices (EBP)
Nurses play a critical role in ensuring evidence-based practices are integrated into the care provision. In the nursing care setting, one way through which nurses should ensure the integration of evidence-based practices is through engagement in research. Nurses should collaborate with other care providers to conduct research and incorporate its findings into nursing home care. They should also review research findings from other scholars and integrate them into nursing home care to improve patient outcomes and quality of care. Nurses’ engagement in research will overhaul the current nursing home culture and lead to improved patient outcomes because patients will receive care that is tailored to meet their physical, psychological, and social needs.
Summary
In a nursing home setting, interprofessional collaboration is critical in improving patient outcomes, quality of care, and patient satisfaction with care. When care providers work collaboratively as a team, patient care is prioritized, and thus, the provision of timely, quality, and affordable care. In a nursing home setting, certain ICARE components such as compassion, advocacy, resilience, and evidence-based practice can be integrated to support interprofessional teams and help the care providers take specific actions, as described in the paper. Such actions lead to organizational cultural change and improve patient outcomes by improving quality, affordability, and satisfaction with care.
References
Conejero, I., Petrier, M., Fabbro Peray, P., Voisin, C., Courtet, P., Potier, H., … & Blain, H. (2023). Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and burnout in nursing home staff in South France during the COVID-19 pandemic. Translational Psychiatry, 13(1), 205.
Novinmehr, N., Hasanpour, M., Salsali, M., Mehrdad, N., Qorbani, M., & Shamsaei, F. (2019). Older adults’ self-advocacy in patient safety: a cross-sectional study. British Journal of Nursing, 28(16), 1076-1084.
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