Cost Containment Study

Communication is key to effective healthcare practices. According to American Journal Of Critical Care (2014), Patient-centered care starts with “effective communication, being empathetic and available, avoiding personal prejudges, and listening therapeutically are integral parts of patient-centered care” (Riley, White, Graham, Alexandrov, 2014, p. 320). This will improve communication; promote patient involvement in care, which creates a positive relationship with the healthcare provider and medical team. This results in improved adherence to treatment plan. Clinical practice guidelines need to be implemented for the patient and family members to be able to be involved in informed decision-making regarding healthcare needs. The fundamental core of nursing is to have a partnership with the patient and their family regarding the patient’s outcome.

Nursing is about providing the best possible holistic care for the patient and family. At the same time there’s an imbalance of patient care regarding education and knowledge being provided by nurses. As a nurse I believe we all owe it to ourselves, the profession, and the patient to provide the best possible care. According to American Nurses Association (ANA) online article “Nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities, and populations.” In order to better achieve the nursing ideals of the American Nurses Association we must improve patient care by requiring hospital nurses to become BSN nurses.

Education is paramount in order for quality of care to improve. APRNs need to provide culturally relevant education to the population they treat. Education needs to be comprehensive and include an explanation of the disease, how the disease may impact the client’s life, medications its purpose and benefits. The education also needs to include negotiating with the client in order to allow for cultural integration. . Education should be given verbally in conjunction with instructions written in the primary language and include a follow up appointment.

The healthcare industry has intensely advanced throughout the world, in turn changing the principles that incorporate the practice and culture of nursing practice. Altering the model of care to a patient-centered mode signifies an organizational culture shift and requires the participation of executives at the senior level (Cliff, 2012). To practice this care to provide the best care possible, it goes beyond the nurse to all healthcare professionals and senior leadership. The days of patients and nurses following a physician’s order without favor to care has now loaned themselves to more of an interdisciplinary approach to practice. Though, it is encouraged that the patient makes decisions for themselves, after receiving the proper education and information on their condition. Part of the patient-centered care is to be the patients’ advocate, by letting them know you are there for them when they are unable to speak and advocate for themselves and what is in their best interest. That goes in hand with educating them on “self-management of care, health literacy, patient, and family education through nurse-patient communication and interaction (Finkelman & Kenner, 2016, p. 271).”

Patient-Centered Care: Patients should have control over the care they receive. By involving patients and family members in their care it will result in better health outcomes. “The response of health care professionals to patients’ questions, concerns, and feedback directly influences how comfortable patients are with speaking up” (Spath, 2011, p. 236). As nurses we need to respect our patients’ wishes and give each

The nurses play a key role in developing and implementing sound education materials for patient, family and community education. The nurse needs to assess each client’s individual nutritional needs by monitoring and intervening with the client’s required acute and nutritional care. Since every client’s plan of care is individualized, the family’s nutritional habits, social, cultural, and physical norms need to be taken into consideration when conducting the assessment. Nurses play an active role in surveying and teaching community groups using a collaborative and interprofessional approach with data collected by the nurses and providers, while the nurse also monitors and evaluates the given interventions. For example, a patient’s pre-pregnancy nutrition is highly important and nurses need to educate the clients to take the recommended daily dosages of prenatal vitamins. The client might not know that she is pregnant and early fetal development occurs before a woman may realize she is pregnant. If the client doesn’t take the required amount of nutrients, the baby will have problems later in life like neural tube defects, a low birth weight, and other problems later in life. Another example is that nurses need to explain to clients that if they have a disease or disorder that to a have a therapeutic nutrition, he or she may need to make

This shift in the setting for health care is moving health care back into the patient’s environment and also requiring people to take a greater role in their individual health management. Nurses can offer professional guidance in this trend as well. Proper diagnosis and treatment will be of paramount importance in the future so that health care funds can be better applied and the nursing experience and knowledge gleaned can be more widely disseminated in the field. (Saver, 2006)

The demand for cost containment, the growth of purchaser influence, the decline trend in inpatient utilization, and the demands of managed care organizations for efficiency, cost containment, coordination of services, and accountability for service outcomes has changed hospitals strategic planning. Hospitals need to reconfigure and reorganize their health service delivery in order to meet the demands of managed care. To make their organization attractive to the managed care industry, system integration strategies began to emerge such as horizontal and vertical integration (Sultz & Young, 2009, p. 103).

B. Resident/Client Education is a conversation in which the health care professional educates the resident/client with facts and further information regarding their personal situation.

As Nurses, we often ask ourselves what more can we do than is currently being done to improve the health of our clients not only in an individual sense but as a community. We are required by the scope and standards of nursing to ask ourselves this type of question by virtue of our profession and indeed is a baccalaureate nurse essential as well. We are in a unique position as nurses to have the most interaction with the community of patients we serve, and we often see the issues that affect the communities we serve more readily. One such issue that is undeniably

Have you noticed that doctors often are so quick to test patients with numerous labs and imaging? Are they always necessary? For example, through evidence-based practice it’s been shown that when a patient comes in with back pain more often all they need is physical therapy, not a STAT CT. Often providers feel they must do everything due to threats of possible legal actions. Cost containment could be also difficult because of patients itself. Because of never ending TV commercials, TV shows, and health magazines people start diagnosing themselves and demanding excessive test and diagnostics. Demanding certain tests or medications when there is no diagnostic reason increases costs to healthcare.

“Family-centered care” is a term heard often in healthcare settings and in nursing practice. Family-centered care has been recognized as being an integral part to patient health, satisfaction and health care quality (Kuo, et al, 2012). Family-centered care is implemented with the goal to increase partnerships between, families, patients and providers; and has been prioritized as a core-concept of quality healthcare (Gallo, Hill, Hoagwood & Olin, 2016) Many professionals, however, would be hard-pressed to state what the term “family-centered care” actually means and how it applies to nursing practice. They would be at a loss for how to implement family-centered care and what is absolutely necessary to have in order for family-centered care to be successful. Advanced practice nurses are faced with the challenge of adhering to family-centered care in their practice. Illness, both chronic and acute, and health does not just affect the patient involved in care. Illness and health affect the patient, their children, their spouses, their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their grandparents and anyone else involved in their life. Research by Davidson (2009) supports the idea that the perceived effectiveness of communication between healthcare providers and the patient’s family is related to the overall satisfaction of care. Advance

Often in practice, we as nurses deal with a variety of diseases and treatments and often have to react to the illness that the patient presents with upon our interaction. While this is an essential piece of our practice, we also have a duty to our patients to be proactive in preventing specific health-related consequences based on their risk factors and to promote their health and well being. Health promotion as it relates to nursing is about us empowering our patients to increase their control over their lives and well beings and includes: focusing on their health not just illness, empowering our patients, recognizing that health involves many dimensions and is also effected by factors outside of their control (Whitehead et al. 2008)..

Changes in the Health Care System and the Practice of Nursing have become complex. Technological changes, complicated client needs, short hospital length of stay, and departure from acute care to community based care, all these changes have underscore the need for professional nurses to think critically in order to provide safe and effective client care. A better educated nursing workforce can provide good health education to patients and their families. The affordable care of 2010 has required the need for nurses to expand their role of practice to meet complicated patient demands. This has prompted the Institute Of Medicine to review the “Future of Nursing, Leading change and Advancing Health”. {Creasia & Fribery,2011}

Patient education plays a vital role in nursing, and as first year nursing students it is important to our career to develop skills in the process of teaching as well as developmental theories. To practice this teaching process, we conducted two interviews with a 19-year-old female currently in the early adulthood stage. Ghorbani, Soleimani, Zeinali and Davaji (2014) state that patient education has been shown to reduced anxiety of patients and improve the satisfaction of health care. Client education is also said to improve the quality of life, helps to reduce illness complications, maximize independence and ensures that continuity of care is present (Bastable, 2014). Although within the health care system things preventing or decreasing the effectiveness of patient education may include nurses not have the knowledge of what to teach or how to teach it and lack of time and resources (Ghorbani et al., 2014). To understand further the important of patient education we must possess a knowledge of the education process including assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation (APIE) (Bastable & Alt, 2014). Throughout this paper, we will evaluate our use of the educational process by teaching the learner about caffeine.