iCARE Implementation & Interprofessional Team Support
iCARE Implementation & Interprofessional Team Support
**Academic Integrity** Statement (Type or paste statement from the assignment guidelines below)
Nursing Actions that can Contribute to iCARE Implementation through Interprofessional Team Support
Nurses are integral to healthcare provision and determinants of the quality and safety of patient care. Nurses’ roles in the healthcare environment are multiple, including collaborating with other professionals to improve care coordination and patient and organizational outcomes. I work as a clinical coordinator at the healthcare organization, working in shifts of 12 hours, from 7 pm to 7 am, five days a week. My primary responsibility is supervising the healthcare organization’s administrative needs. As part of the organization’s leadership, I am responsible for promoting a positive nursing workforce and organizational outcomes (Cummings et al., 2010). I work closely with other nurses and professionals from other fields as a member of the interdisciplinary team. The team is effective in optimizing healthcare outcomes. Still, collaboration and team effectiveness can be improved by adopting iCARE components of compassion, advocacy, resilience, and evidence-based practice. As nurses, we are expected to provide compassionate care, advocate for patients and the profession, demonstrate resilience, and commit to evidence-based practice, which can be achieved through various nursing actions.
Compassion
Demonstrating cultural awareness is a nursing action that could contribute to compassion through interprofessional team support. Cultural awareness should be part of the organization’s culture, as research indicates a positive association between cultural awareness and patient outcomes (Brooks et al., 2019). Cultural awareness links to patient-centered care. The healthcare environment and healthcare consumers are diverse from different cultural backgrounds, which dictate their worldviews, beliefs, values, and preferences, that, in turn, influence a patient’s perception of treatment, overall health, and death (Brooks et al., 2019). Nurses should know their patients well enough to develop a therapeutic nurse-patient relationship. By developing cultural awareness and sensitivity, nurses demonstrate compassionate care because they consider patients’ values, cultures, perceptions, and health beliefs in healthcare decision-making. Additionally, cultural sensitivity extends to relationships with other healthcare professionals who are diverse from different nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and races (Brooks et al., 2019). Culturally competent nurses can effectively engage other nurses and professionals from other fields and develop meaningful interdisciplinary relationships and teams where individuals feel respected, heard, and valued.
Implementing and ensuring cultural sensitivity is possible at an interdisciplinary level because various healthcare professionals engage to provide care. All interdisciplinary team members should be culturally competent to ensure that patient values and beliefs are respected across the board. Interdisciplinary teams should integrate the virtues of empathy, respect, kindness, and sympathy into team values to ensure companionate care through cultural sensitivity (Brooks et al., 2019). Cultural sensitivity training can help nurses identify and manage cultural biases that negatively impact compassionate care. Integrating cultural sensitivity into the organization’s culture is critical in ensuring a safe, inclusivity, and equitable culture, which are also vital components of compassionate care (Brooks et al., 2019). Additionally, culturally sensitive care is associated with positive patient outcomes, including patient satisfaction, treatment adherence, and patient and family engagement. As a clinical coordinator, I can ensure practitioners comply with the organization’s best practices, including providing culturally sensitive care to ensure compassionate care.
(iCARE Implementation & Interprofessional Team Support)
Advocacy
Patient education is one of the nursing actions that could contribute to advocacy. The current emphasis is patient safety, delivered through effective interprofessional teams. Interprofessional collaboration is associated with improved patient safety and can support patient education, which is possible through well-coordinated interprofessional practice. Advocacy is critical in promoting safe clinical practice, and its absence is associated with undesirable consequences like increased hospital-acquired infections (Nsiah et al., 2019). Nurses are more legally and ethically accountable to clients and should protect patients’ rights to equitable, quality, safe, and competent care. Patient advocacy in clinical settings emphasizes healthcare resources, health conditions, patient needs, and the general public and the community.
As indicated, patient education supported through interprofessional practice is an approach to advocating for patients. Patient education seeks to enhance health literacy and awareness of health conditions. Nurses should offer patients meaningful information to help take control of their health, manage their health, and improve their quality of life. As patients gain more understanding, it is easier to advocate for themselves (Paterick et al., 2017). Patient education is also integral in ensuring a culture of safety. It influences response to recommendations for lifestyle changes, healthcare interventions, and health-promoting behavior like treatment adherence. Patient education is also linked to positive patient outcomes, including reduced disease progression, better disease management, reduced readmission and rehospitalization rates, and increased recovery rates (Paterick et al., 2017). As the clinical coordinator at the healthcare organization, I can review and oversee practitioners’ work procedures to ensure patient education is part of the nursing advocacy action and patient education is enabled and embraced by interprofessional teams because all professionals involved have unique knowledge and information to share with patients that can help enhance patient understanding of their health condition.
Resilience
Nurses can cultivate resilience by maintaining a supportive social network of nursing colleagues and other professionals. It is a form of collaboration enabled through healthy relationships with other healthcare providers, enhancing a nurse’s ability to adapt to the healthcare environment and challenging situations. Nurses should build resilience to serve as a protective element against undesired consequences or outcomes associated with the nursing job, such as burnout, anxiety, compassion fatigue, and depression, and ensure positive patient outcomes (Tawfik et al., 2017). Interprofessional collaboration involves developing and maintaining positive relationships and social networks with colleagues and is one way to build resilience. Nurses should talk to their colleagues about issues they are experiencing to solicit combined experience, collective action, and decision-making to address the issues and disruptive changes. As a clinical coordinator, I engage nurses and other healthcare providers to help them develop professional networks and interprofessional relationships, which have proven to enhance resilience. Collaboration and social networks in healthcare have been shown to enhance a culture of safety and improve patient outcomes (“Week 5 Lesson”). Staff resilience is enhanced in a team climate and can help drive quality and safe care.
Evidence-Based Practice
Conducting nursing research and gathering the best available evidence, and integrating it into practice can contribute to evidence-based practice, adopting the principles of interprofessional EBP, including communication collaboration, leadership, and collective decision-making. Team members can share information, experiences, and insights into various practice issues, enhancing evidence-based practice through interprofessional team support (Nandiwada & Kormos, 2018). Patient care requires combining the knowledge and competencies of professionals from different fields to optimize care. Interprofessional team members adopt scientific literature, professional expertise, and organizational data respective to their specific fields and share this evidence with team members to ensure evidence-based practice (Nandiwada & Kormos, 2018). For instance, physicians can collect and share evidence with nurses regarding a specific treatment regimen, ensuring team-based evidence-based practice. Gathering the best evidence and incorporating it into practice promotes a safety culture and is linked to better clinical decisions and improved patient outcomes. As a clinical coordinator overseeing practitioners’ work procedures, I can encourage interprofessional team members to contribute their respective expertise, scientific research, and experiences to enhance interprofessional EBP.
(iCARE Implementation & Interprofessional Team Support)
Summary
Various iCARE components, including compassion, advocacy, evidence-based practice, and resilience, can promote interprofessional teamwork, ensure a culture of safety, and optimize patient outcomes through specific nursing actions, including providing culturally sensitive care, educating patients, developing and maintaining professional and social networks and collaborating with other providers, and gathering best evidence and integrating it into practice. Integrating cultural sensitivity into the organization’s culture is critical in ensuring a culture of safe, inclusivity, and equality, which are also vital components of compassionate care. Patient education, an approach to practitioner-patient advocacy, is linked to positive patient outcomes, including reduced disease progression, better disease management, reduced readmission, rehospitalization rates, and increased recovery rates. Practitioners can cultivate resilience through collaboration and social networks in healthcare, which have been shown to enhance a culture of safety and improve patient outcomes. Staff resilience is enhanced in a team climate and can help drive quality and safe care. EBP is enabled by gathering and incorporating the best evidence into practice, which is vital in promoting a safety culture and improving clinical decisions and patient outcomes. As a clerical coordinator, I can oversee practitioners’ work procedures to ensure that iCARE components are integrated into interprofessional team values and principles and adopted as part of team culture. I can supervise the cultivation of these components in interprofessional teams in the organization.
References
Brooks, L. A., Manias, E., & Bloomer, M. J. (2019). Culturally sensitive communication in healthcare: A concept analysis. Collegian, 26(3), 383-391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.colegn.2018.09.007
Cummings, G. G., MacGregor, T., Davey, M., Lee, H., Wong, C. A., Lo, E., … & Stafford, E. (2010). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: a systematic review. International journal of nursing studies, 47(3), 363-385.
Nandiwada, D. R., & Kormos, W. (2018). Interprofessional evidence-based practice competencies: equalizing the playing field. JAMA Network Open, 1(2), e180282-e180282.
Nsiah, C., Siakwa, M., & Ninnoni, J. P. K. (2019). Registered Nurses’ description of patient advocacy in the clinical setting. Nursing open, 6(3), 1124–1132. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.307
Paterick, T. E., Patel, N., Tajik, A. J., & Chandrasekaran, K. (2017). Improving health outcomes through patient education and partnerships with patients. Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center), 30(1), 112–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/08998280.2017.11929552
Tawfik, D. S., Sexton, J. B., Adair, K. C., Kaplan, H. C., & Profit, J. (2017). Context in Quality of Care: Improving Teamwork and Resilience. Clinics in perinatology, 44(3), 541–552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clp.2017.04.004
Week_5_Lesson_Foundational_Concepts__RN_Capstone_Course-Barten.pdf. file:///C:/Users/pc/Downloads/Week_5__Lesson__Foundational_Concepts__RN_Capstone_Course-Barten.pdf
