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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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