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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Elisa J. Gordon, PhD, Stritch School of Medicine, Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics, Loyola University Medical Center, 2160 S. First Avenue, Maywood, IL 60302, 708-327-9220, egordo1@Lumc.edu and Peter J. Minich, MD, PhD, Education, Vanderbilt University, 7 Tullis Drive, upstairs, Toronto, ON M4S 2E2, Canada.
The crisis in health care funding has left hospitals struggling to provide safe innovative care on budgets that are 50% less than 10 years ago. One management tactic has been to spread nurses thin. Another has been to substitute less trained individuals to perform care that has been traditionally performed by well-trained, highly skilled nurses. Both efforts are problematic for the provision of safe patient care. In the former, nurses are denied adequate time to make accurate patient assessments. In the later, inadequate training is the problem. Either way, patients are not being properly assessed. When inaccurate data are then passed on to physicians, inappropriate actions are generated, and mistakes are made. This paper will explore the problems confronting health care providers as patient care data are exchanged in the contemporary health care environment. We draw upon in-depth interviews with nurses about their perceptions of the impact nursing aids have had on patient care to highlight the importance of communication between nurses and physicians. The paper discusses how nurses and physicians can deal with this organizational change by becoming better at assessing exactly what the quality of information is.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Health Care Quality, Health Communications
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.