How Nurses Can Inspire Patients to Take Better Care of Themselves

Becoming a nurse is a big commitment to yourself and life in general. It is a profession that will always keep you engaged in learning new things. Along with substantial knowledge of medical concepts, you will also keep developing a lot more skills that will help you improve things at work. International students who study in Canada and pursue postgraduate nursing courses get a fair exposure to the fact that nurses are the closest allies to their patients. The influence left by nurses on their patients makes a lot of difference in the progress of their healing and recovery.

Nurses have various ways to inspire their patients to take better care of themselves. Let us emphasize this fact more. Listed below are some of the practices that can be helpful for you.

Identifying & Addressing Patient Needs

The needs of every patient will differ depending upon their health history. The first step here would be to acknowledge this. Furthermore, you must know that most of the patients are already aware of it, but there are a few who might want to hear it from you. So, as a nurse, you must explain to your patients everything about their health using the right approach. Any advice or suggestions coming from your side should be helpful, and unlike heaps of things they must have already heard from their family members.

The best approach to identifying and addressing varying patient needs is to create plans. Creating plans can help you understand what your patients already know and what they don’t. Based on this information, you’ll be better prepared to know how and what are you supposed to say things, which your patients must know and haven’t been told so far.

Effective Patient Follow-Ups

Unless you’re a busy nurse working in the ER, patient follow-ups are very important. Why we’d like to exclude ER nurses from this point because it is quite realistic to be unable to take patient follow-ups in an ER specialty.

Patient follow-ups in various departments and specialties can take the form of a phone call, email, or message. It is always a good idea to keep follow-ups more personalized and not generic. Doing so will make your patients understand that you are trying to go above and beyond to help them feel healthy again. It will also instill in them a feeling of wanting to take better care of themselves.

Integrated Patient Communication

Communication is essential to encourage improved patient care experiences. Effective communication with your patients is one of the easiest ways to inspire them. Becoming a nurse demands you improve visibly on your communication skills. Nurses who are good communicators can progress swiftly in their careers. The main benefit of being able to communicate well with your patients is that you can build up trust with them. They would want

to hear advice and suggestions from you because they would trust that when it is coming from you, it will only help them get better.

Impact of the Pandemic on Nursing Workforce in Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic posed prominent challenges to the nursing profession. Students pursuing nursing courses in Canada had to face many challenges. 

After the pandemic, there has been a need to overcome the challenges in nursing education and workforce for promoting the professional development of nurses. In Canada, nurses are the foundation of the healthcare system. Together with other healthcare professionals, nurses keep the system running. 

Mentioned below are the four key factors that highlight the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce in Canada.  

Nursing Workforce Supply: 

There was an increase in the supply of healthcare workers including nurses and other healthcare professionals. Physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, and everyone increased in numbers. Most of these healthcare professionals worked in a role related to their field of expertise. 

Nursing Workforce Capacity: 

New ways were looked to build the healthcare workforce capacity. The increase in supply of healthcare workers helped in welcoming the new entrants to the profession. 

Many nursing professionals including the ones who had just completed their nursing courses in Canada joined their practice. Despite the increased workforce, healthcare worker infections sometimes led to shortages. This further led many healthcare settings to implement ways for maintaining suitable and safe staffing levels

. 

Nursing Workforce in Virtual Care: 

For containing the spread of COVID, so many healthcare professionals started offering virtual care including physicians. Many nurses along with physicians started offering virtual care services in Canada. This led nurses to explore the digital medium for offering healthcare services. 

Nursing Workforce in Long-Term Care: 

Canada’s long term nursing care was affected seriously by the pandemic. The registered nurses made up the largest proportion of nurses working in this area. These nurses also had the highest proportion of part-time and casual workers compared with other nurses working in long term care. 

Conclusion:

During the pandemic, nurses have continued to provide care to patients despite being exhausted and at risk of infection. Even amidst the risk of infection, fear of transmitting the disease to family members and the loss of patients and colleagues, nurses did not give up. 

Although this negatively affected the mental health of nurses, it has also promoted their position as caregivers within the healthcare industry. Canada understands and acknowledges the work done by nurses even more than before, which led to better nursing education and employment opportunities. 

Importance of Value-Based Care for Nurses

 Being a nurse makes you a member of one of the world’s most respected and oldest professions. However, the scope of nursing today is nothing like what it was in the past. It has evolved considerably because medical and technological advancements change the landscape of nursing in Canada every year. 

Value-based nursing care is an example of such advancement. It is a method of nursing care that focuses on quality rather than volume. It is an old fee-for-service system that pays the providers for tests and procedures performed along with the number of patients being managed otherwise. 

If you serve as a nurse in the present time, it is important for you to understand the importance of Value-based patient care. In this blog, we will read why. 

What is Value-based Patient Care? 

Value-based healthcare is about offering quality health care delivery rather than tending to the highest number of patients. It is a reward system that gives incentives to providers based on the quality of care they deliver to their patients. 

If you wish to study nursing in Canada then you must understand that value-based care is a system in which nurses meet the criteria of evidence-based medicine. It is a method of care that offers much better patient satisfaction, upgrades health information technology, and incorporates data analytics for management strategies. 

In all, value-based care focuses on the three things in healthcare. They include providing better patient care, improving health for patient populations, and reducing any healthcare costs. 

Role of Nurses in Value-based Care: 

As mentioned above, the profession of nursing has evolved because of the incorporation of value-based healthcare. The nurses must take a coordinated approach to patient care so that collaboration and communication amongst the members of an interdisciplinary team become important to developing and streamlining a care plan for patients. 

Study Nursing in Canada pays special attention to value-based care. This is because value-based care highlights the integration of primary, acute, and specialty care relevant for sharing patient information and eliminating any redundant care. 

Another important role of nurses in value-based care is linked to education. Nursing professionals are supposed to instruct the patients about leading a healthy life with the right self-care choices. Learning value-based healthcare practices enables the nurses to guide their patients in the sense that they can avoid a medical crisis in the future. 

Value Based Care Helps Patients: 

For nurses, the patients come before all else and value-based care is the best form to ensure that the patients get maximum benefits from healthcare delivery services. It is a method that replaces the method of putting patients through many unrequired tests and procedures. 

The reimbursements for value-based care are actually led by the data that find the best practices for enhancing the likelihood of patients recovering from or living with certain conditions. In addition, healthcare organizations and professionals are rewarded for carrying out healthcare services that are beneficial to patients. 

Conclusion: 

The foremost priority of a nurse is to stay vigilant about the well-being of patients. Value-based care alleviates any hardships that patients and nurses might encounter by closing the gaps in services. 

With the promotion of prevention, nurses can ensure a healthy patient population with very few chronic conditions. By learning value-based care, nurses can stay committed to offering optimal healthcare services. 

Simulation: An Intrinsic Element in Nursing Education

Technology plays a momentous role in every profession. It has crossed all the dimensions of healthcare field too. There is an obvious advancement in the technologies used in hospital settings as well as education settings. Starting from the assessment of patients  to the treatment modalities, a wide range of equipment has taken over the role of nurses. For example, Electronic health record has replaced the manual documentation of patient care. The electronic health record was integrated into the clinical workflow to maintain right documentation of patient details and care,  and to ensure safe, quality care to the clients. Similar to the clinical setting, technological innovations are advancing in the field of nursing education as well. The introduction of simulation in nursing has bridged the gap between classroom knowledge and clinical practice.

 

What is simulation and what role does it play in the nursing education? It is the imitation or replication of a situation or an event that one would confront in the real world (Sasser, 2011). Simulation has been used in the health care field for quite some time now. It has undergone an event of changes from the first life size manikin popularly known as Mrs Chase to the high fidelity full body patient simulators. A nurse gains knowledge through academic studies, practical sessions, case studies, conferences and so on. “I hear I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” This Chinese proverb applies to nursing education too. Nursing students learn theory in school and get their practical exposure in the clinical settings. In many cases students are unable to think critically and are anxious while providing care to the patients. Moreover, their confidence level is pretty low that affects their overall performance. Simulation plays a central role in today’s nursing education.

Nursing in Abroad:- Going back to early 1900s, nursing students practiced their skills on injection pads, IM injection on oranges and so on. After few years, the life size manikin Mrs Chase took over the nursing skill area and she became more popular nationally as well as globally. Over the years, the simulation or the simulators underwent appreciable changes and now it plays a crucial role in improving the nurses’ practical skills. There are different components of simulation which includes task trainers, computer based programs, games, partial task trainers, standardized patients, role play, instructor regulated simulators etc. Task trainers are partial manikins that are used to practice definite skills like catheterization, IM injection, suctioning and so on (Kyle & Murray, 2008). Standardized patients are well-trained individuals who mimic a role so that the nursing students can practice their skills of assessment and improve their communication skills. Integrated simulators are again divided into low fidelity, moderate and high fidelity manikins based on their functions. High fidelity manikins are used in the educational set ups to enable students practice and improve advanced nursing skills. These are instructor driven and allow students to practice their nursing , critical thinking, decision making and communication skills in a given patient scenario. Simulation is helpful in many ways. It improves essential nursing skills like critical thinking, decision-making, assessment and permits them to handle challenging situations in a safe and controlled environment. This in turn improves the student confidence in dealing with a similar situation in the near future. In addition, nursing students are allowed to make mistakes in a safe scenario.

In Nursing schools, before the simulation session the students are asked to complete pre-exercise or pre-simulation activities such as reading lessons, listening to a recording or going through a power point presentation as preparation. The instructor divides the students into small groups and gives them a scenario. The students are expected to use their nursing knowledge and other skills to encounter the situation within the given time frame. Later, after the simulation session, reflective  feedback or debriefing is done by the instructor to make the students realize their strengths and weaknesses. Debriefing session helps the student to review their performance and understand their mistakes, which helps them in advancing their existing skills. Similarly, simulation sessions are conducted in hospitals for medical professionals to upgrade their professional practice skills, promote patient safety and to improve teamwork.

In short, nursing simulation scenarios mimic real patient situations in a safe controlled environment. It promotes active learning, team building, communication skills and self-efficacy. Students assume the role of a nurse and take the responsibility of providing comprehensive care as the patient takes a turn for the worse. Learning from mistakes is one of the best ways to improve skills and moreover building confidence. Present nursing education has made many revisions and simulation classes are an integral part in the present curriculum. All the colleges and universities have introduced simulation-based trainings in their nursing curriculum to improve the student performance and to upgrade their nursing practical skills that would ultimately transform them to competent and intelligent nurses in the future.