Nursing advocacy strategies for improving healthcare quality and access to long-term services

¶ … Nursing

Advocate for Higher Health Care Quality

One way that nurses can pursue the cause of high quality health care is through agitating for deployment of sufficient numbers of nurses in both primary and secondary school systems. Normally, school nurses are overloaded with workload because the number of students they are expected to attend to each day is way too high (Maryland & Gonzalez, 2012). Indeed, it is common practice in the U.S. for a single nurse to be responsible for caring for the health of students in two separate schools. This greatly hampers the quality of health care, owing to the huge ratio of students to the number of nurses.

Nurses can positively influence healthcare through relationships and encounters in their work places. In the case of a remodeling project (Maryland & Gonzalez, 2012; Tomajan, 2012), a forum is called in to moderate discussion on the proposed remodeling project at a given health center, nurses working as a group could participate in such a public forum and provide information on why the project that has been proposed would be a good thing to do.

Increased Access to Long-Term Services and Support (LTSS)

Long-term support programs and long-term services can be started by nurses for the community. Thus, nurses would liaise with states, providers, advocates, consumers and other interested parties to offer sustainable support systems that are person-driven; for the long-term; and ones in which the disabled people, and those with chronic ailments will also have a choice to an array of healthcare services that will guarantee them high quality care (Woodcock, 2011). A program like that should be inclusive, effective, accountable, efficient, sustainable, transparent, person-driven, competent; culturally and well coordinated.

Nurses can also promote access to LTSS by adopting and utilizing information technology. Service delivery will be enhanced by these strategies. Nurses would be helped to maintain a single but dynamic record of all patients in one place in a way that they can access by a click of a mouse; linking healthcare services and records, case records, care plans, and related data with the administrative data at Medicaid MDS for residents of nursing homes and related data sets. It would be easy for providers to follow the health care record of a patient; even as such clients keep moving from one healthcare facility to another. Linked automated data makes it possible to access reliable metrics for tracking the program performance and outcomes of clients (Woodcock, 2011).

The Australian Approach versus the U.S. Approach

The United States applies the systems approach in its attempts to provide quality healthcare. The systems approach is more comprehensive in the provision of healthcare service. They are dynamic and call for multiple layers of change including redefining job descriptions, changing work flow patterns, and integrating a range of information sources in clinical health care service (Reuben, 2007). The systems approach may even apply alternative approaches of health care service delivery including disease management plans, home visits by the nursing care staffs, and post discharge visits, self-management classes in health care and more.

In Australia, on the other hand, they employ a patient centered method to improve the quality of healthcare. The approach is given impetus and supported by the National Safety and Quality Framework, state-based inquiries reports, a wide range of initiatives from both the public and private sector, Australian Charter of Health Care Rights and a number of national service standards (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2010). There is research that demonstrates that patient centered approach enhances patient care and initiates public value for health services rendered. When stakeholders such as patients, their families, healthcare providers and administrators cooperate, the safety and quality of health care services rises; while the costs decline. Satisfaction by the provider rises while the experience in patient care is enhanced.