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faculty focus be examining this in the future. How do we help patients become more engaged and active in their care?
We also need to ensure we understand patients’ preferences and respect them. That is, we should be taking patients’ individual wants and desires into consideration, even if it means they don’ t want to be actively involved in their care. We’ re just finishing a large Australian Research Council discovery study looking at patients’ preferences for participation in care. In particular, we’ ve been focusing on bedside nursing handover. I think there’ s a lot more to understand about how patients want to be engaged and how we, as nurses, promote that engagement to the level patients want.
You’ ve said your biggest wish is to overturn the idea that nurses are best trained in hospitals, rather than universities. Why is this an opinion that should be challenged? You hear that so much. I groan every time
I hear it. I think it’ s because the world, hospitals and patients have all evolved over time. When we think about the patients today who are admitted to hospitals, they are much sicker than the patients of the past. The treatments they receive are far more complex and these treatments are much more advanced. The numbers and types of specialist clinicians patients interact with have grown exponentially.
That means a similar thing for nurses. Nurses work in multidisciplinary teams and we need to be able to ensure that our nursing work doesn’ t get lost in the busyness of following the orders of these other professional groups. When a doctor, physiotherapist or dietician says this patient needs this, that, or the other, great, we need to ensure we implement that – but there is some nursing work that can’ t get lost in that.
I think to deliver safe care, nurses have to have a strong knowledge base that is vastly different to what it was 30 – 40 years
ago when they were trained in hospitals. Nurses need to be able to use the research findings people like myself generate, to improve the care of patients and, hopefully, their outcomes. I think both the intellectual and physical skill sets nurses require have evolved over time, and when people suggest they are better trained in hospitals, they forget that.
Nursing is both an art and a science, and I think people are equating this hospital training to the caring side of nursing – the art – because that’ s what they remember. They’ re not acknowledging the science part of our work.
As a patient, of course I want a caring, sympathetic nurse. But I also want a nurse who can think critically about my condition, about my needs and my preferences. I want them to know what the research says about what they’ re doing and to use the most upto-date evidence when they’ re caring for me. This doesn’ t come from the traditional hospital model of training nurses. n
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