Delve into the Awareness of the Nurse’s Vital Role in the Coordination and Continuum of Care

Nurses play an essential role in the coordination and continuum of care. Their position in healthcare makes them valuable in developing care plans for the patients, educating patients on evidence-based practices and healthcare plans, adopting meaningful technologies in healthcare, and creating positive changes in communities by heightening surveillance of them and engaging in health promotional activities in these communities. As Conway et al. (2019) report, nurses positively impact care coordination as nurse-coordinated care roles are likely to improve patient and healthcare outcomes. Nurses are likely to affect positive changes when they are frequently involved in in-person interactions with their patients and their families, engage in active follow-ups of their patients as part of the care continuum, and are interested in behavioral change intervention activities such as community outreach programs. This reinforces the need for nurses to engage in care coordination roles.

Nurse practitioners should recognize that their input in care coordination and continuum is indispensable. In this regard, nurses should be ready to employ the ethical principles that govern nursing practice in being better health stewards for their patients. Nurse practitioners can make a difference in patient’s lives and the community by maintaining accountability and employing nursing knowledge and skills. As healthcare leaders, one can influence positive healthcare changes that improve the care operationalization process and enhance clinical outcomes and patient experiences. As care approaches tend towards patient-centeredness and value-based approaches, let us stand to be the difference makers in healthcare.

In conclusion, care coordination approaches remain valuable in healthcare. These approaches utilize collaborative paradigms that synchronize healthcare functionalities toward enhancing patient experiences and clinical outcomes. To effect the best change processes that enhance aspects of patient experiences, organizational leadership alignment to the provisions of the change and the organization’s readiness for these changes is pivotal. Coordinated approaches maintain superiority over other methods due to their ability to ensure better clinical outcomes and patient experiences. These approaches are also ethically based, stemming from ethical provisions of beneficence and non-maleficence. Important healthcare policies such as HITECH also promote patients’ experiences and enhance clinical outcomes. These technologies maintain significance in healthcare. As nurse practitioners, we should be aware of such policies and other aspects of coordination and continuum of care.

References

Atasoy, H., Greenwood, B. N., & McCullough, J. S. (2019). The digitization of patient care: A review of the effects of electronic health records on Health Care Quality and utilization. Annual Review of Public Health, 40(1), 487–500. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-044206