In today’s world, healthcare organizations are full of skilled, knowledgeable, and passionate multidisciplinary nurses. Even though different specialties of nursing have a specific focus with regards to medical science, all nurses share a common goal of ensuring a positive patient care experience and healthcare environment.
Nursing in Canada is based on the teams of nurses analyzing their strengths and skills for achieving an optimal solution to enhance patient care experiences. To ensure that the patients are completely satisfied with their healthcare experience, nurses embrace a teamwork approach towards healthcare delivery. This requires effective communication skills and collaborative care coordination.
Since most nurses spend a considerable amount of time with patients, they have a significant impact on patient care experiences. To prepare them for their jobs, nurses are taught about the factors that influence the quality of patient experiences when they study nursing in Canada.
In this blog, we will look at some extraordinary patient care experiences shared by nurses to understand the views of nurses on their work and work environment.
What is Patient Care Experience?
Patient care experience includes a wide range of interactions that patients have with the healthcare system including following the healthcare plans, consulting doctors, taking support of nurses, and using different healthcare facilities.
As one of the most vital components of healthcare, patient care experience involves aspects of healthcare delivery that are focused on benefitting patients. In this equation, nurses ensure that the patients receive care, get timely appointments, are offered easy access to information, are looked after at all times, and get supported in their journey of healing.
Nursing colleges in Canada make sure that nursing students realize the importance of patient experience for ensuring patient-centred care. Nurses are in fact taught to look at different aspects of patient experience by assessing the extent to which patients receive respectful and responsive care. Almost at all times, nursing professionals are on guard to ensure that patient preferences, needs, and values are understood.
For nurses, evaluating patient experience along with other components of healthcare counts as an effective and safe way of optimal healthcare delivery.
Patient Care Experiences Shared By Nurses:
1. Inclusive Frontline Patient Care:
“Nurses seek new opportunities to practice their science and art. They are moving well beyond traditional sites and signing on to work in developing countries, war zones, and devastated areas of their own country. The art of nursing care is not dependent on disruptive technology or costly medical tests. Sitting alongside a worried patient on the floor in some remote area requires the same patience, concern, and care as does sitting in an intensive care unit at one of the best hospitals in a developed city.” – Janis Bellipanni, Public Health Nurse Around the World
The natural impulse to offer compassionate and medically sound care to the patients in need emerges from deep within the soul of nurses. When nurses care for others, they fulfill a purpose that extends beyond them. There are public health nurses who serve all over the world to ensure the delivery of inclusive healthcare services.
They stand at the frontline to be there for patients in stressful circumstances because they understand the universal importance of caring for people in need. Nurses seek many opportunities for practicing their science of healing. In today’s time, they are moving out of their native countries to help people all across the world.
What’s more, they welcome patients from all backgrounds and tend to them because of which the process of healthcare delivery becomes respectable, seamless, and inclusive. From earlier times, nurses have never limited their knowledge and professional expertise to just one group of people.
Nurses are trained to offer equitable and compassionate care, which also makes them cultural ambassadors in all places. For instance, Canada is a highly diverse country inhabiting people from across the globe. Nursing courses in Canada teach nursing students to offer culturally sound care supported with relevant knowledge, skills, and insights in all circumstances.
2. Familial Patient Care Experiences:
“Being a staff nurse, I noticed the difference it can make to include family in the care of loved ones. Many patients were acutely ill, and when I discovered that their family members were well informed, the patient care plan was executed smoothly. Many times, the family also becomes an ally in delivery care and supporting the patient improvements in areas such as nutrition, emotional support, pain management, and discharge.” – Richard Cowling, APRN –BC
Nursing is based on kindness, compassion, and the importance of making the patients feel cared for in all circumstances. Even during the times when the patient is suffering from a serious illness, nurses go above and beyond in ensuring that the patient feels cared by either informing the family members or filling in for family members so that getting through a disease becomes easy.
If a person is diagnosed with serious illness and the family members feel stressed then nurses make sure to work closely with the patient and patient’s family. Nursing professionals also understand the nervousness, emotional breakdowns, and fear attached to dealing with diseases.
Hence, playing the role of a family member, nursing professionals continue providing an understanding ear and support all through the treatment. This extends to making sure that the patients follow the treatment plan, eat at the right time, and are coping well with the problem mentally. Nurses are heroes who offer enriching care experiences to patients and families in need.
3. Patient Care During Natural or Man-Made Disasters:
“I have seen tremors of an earthquake and majestic eruptions of Volcanoes while experiencing limited supplies and sometimes long power outages when hospital generators were not working. Through the years of living in a country with natural hazards, one becomes either desensitized or immersed in the work needed to prevent, mitigate, and prepare individuals and communities.” – Sheila Bonito, PhD, Professor at the University of the Philippines Open University, Former Chair of Disaster Preparedness Committee of the Philippine Nurses Association
Nursing professionals go above and beyond the call of duty to assemble teams that help the victims overcome challenges posed by natural or man-made disasters. From setting up a makeshift clinic to walking down the local streets, nurses are trained to have a distinct ability that offers free healthcare to evacuees.
Standard procedures that are supposed to be carried out in healthcare environments are taught to all students who study nursing in Canada. But in the case of natural or man-made disasters, it is much more than following the standard procedures.
In times when unfortunate natural or man-made disasters take place, the caring presence of nurses fills people with hope. Nurses can change lives by empowering patients in a way that they gather strength and courage to move on. They work for long hours to help the survivors get basic necessities such as water, food, and hygiene supplies.
Other than helping survivors get basic supplies and physical care, the nursing teams also perform direct interventions and a comforting reassurance of a loving presence. Doing this kind of work opens the hearts of nurses even more while deepening their compassion for others and themselves. It drives them home to the reality that all humans are vulnerable and connected with shared human needs.
Conclusion:
When it comes to compassion, kindness, and caring for patients, nurses stand supreme invariably. They work for long hours carrying out important healthcare tasks for making sure that the patients are doing well physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Patient care is the first priority of nurses in all circumstances because nurses enter the profession with a strong desire to help and care for others. From schools, homes, hospitals, different clinical settings, warzones, disaster-hit areas, to communities all over the world, nurses work to offer compassion whenever and wherever it is needed.
