Support for Nursing Care Plans
Our nursing care plans can impact patient readmission rates. In our scope of practice we assess our patients for patterns of human responses. We use that assessment to create a nursing regimen that can help with health behaviors and coping.
Addressing these issues would make a difference in readmissions rates according to a recent study. A study of HSCT patients at The James discovered that psychosocial factors can impact risk of readmission.
In the latest issue of The Cancer Connection there was a brief on readmission rates. Our very own Dr. Ashley Rosko, MD, senior author of the study, remarked:
“Just like we assess potential impact and risks of a patient’s co-morbidities before pursuing a stem cell transplant, we saw a need to evaluate psychosocial vulnerabilities to identify those patients at the highest risk for complications and develop interventions to ensure the smoothest recovery possible.”
The most common identified risk factors included: poor health behaviors (16 percent) and poor coping history (13 percent).
“We need to help our patients better cope with the chronic stress of a cancer diagnosis and treatment so that they are less likely to have setbacks in care due to additional illness,” adds Rosko.
These issues are within Nursing’s scope of practice. A quick look at NurseLabs nursing interventions for coping suggests the following nursing interventions and rationale:
This sounds like Relationship-Based Care – see the patient as a person, not an object. This is Nursing.