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Care rationing a sad reality

Care rationing web headerNZNO believes every patient has the right to receive quality care, every shift, every day. Nurses, midwives and health-care assistants also have the right to work in safe, supportive environments and be enabled to provide quality care.

The Safe staffing healthy workplaces unit defines care rationing as: “Any occasion when an aspect of a patient’s required care is either missed altogether, unduly delayed, performed to a suboptimal standard or inappropriately delegated to someone not qualified to perform the activity.”

Is care rationing the “new normal” in patient care?  Are failing to take observations and administer medications on time, inability to turn bedridden patients two hourly, skipping hygiene cares, inability to mobilise patients  regularly, failing to provide comprehensive patient education, not answering call bells, all too familiar aspects of too many nurses’ shifts, too often?

Care rationing is unacceptable because it means patients do not receive all the care they require, it exposes patients to unacceptable risks, it can have serious consequences, it increases patient morbidity and mortality, and contravenes people’s rights to health services of an appropriate standard.

Drawing on national and international research, NZNO’s newly-released position statement attributes care rationing to a systems failure due to inadequate staffing or inappropriate skill mix or insufficient time or a combination of these factors.

The position statement was developed to articulate that care rationing is a systems failure, not a failure of individual nurses. We have chosen the term ‘care rationing’ because terms such as ‘missed care’ or ‘care left undone’ imply that an individual nurse is to blame.

Care rationing is not just another form of prioritisation. Prioritisation occurs at the start of a shift when nurses consider the work that has to be done over their shift and what needs to be done first. Care rationing happens in a chaotic way when there are simply not enough staff to do the work and nurses have no control over the situation.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. NZNO has a plan to eliminate care rationing. What we need is:

  • increased funding for DHBs;
  • nursing care made a priority in decision-making;
  • nursing seen as an investment, not a cost;
  • patient-centred models of care;
  • a focus on early intervention and prevention, and nurses working to the full extent of their scope;
  • full implementation of the care capacity demand management programme in all DHBs;
  • effective workforce planning;
  • transparency about staffing levels;
  • funding to address its cultural impacts;
  • immediate action when staffing requirements are not met to ensure patients get the care they need; and
  • patients who are empowered to complain when their needs are not met because of inadequate staffing.

To find out more about care rationing and what NZNO is doing to eliminate it, go to www.nzno.org.nz/carerationing

 

This blog post was developed from an article first published in Kai Taiki Nursing NZ, vol 20, no 6, July 2014.

 

 

 


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My journey, my patient’s journey

emotional-intelligenceHere’s another blog by West Coast mental health nurse Teniah Howell. This blog is cross-posted with permission  from the Nurses Station blog “The Tea Room”. You can read Teniah’s previous post here.

The topic of emotional intelligence has come up multiple times in my journey through nursing school and into the “real world” of nursing. When the topic was first mentioned to me, I had never heard of such a thing before, and really never considered the need to become competent in this area.

Emotional intelligence, essentially, is the ability to recognise your own feelings, emotions, and responses, as well as those of others. Now, we recognise these emotions in different ways – some people journal, some people simply contemplate, and others discuss with trusted mentors/supervision/work place support etc. The importance in understanding where we are at in our own lives allows us to more easily interpret the emotions and responses of the patients we work alongside. It is easier to help our patients find strategies for coping that work for them, if we have first acknowledged and recognised our own strengths and abilities to cope. Nurses cannot relate to patients and help them if they are themselves in an emotionally unstable place.

One thing that I have noticed in my own practice, is that in order to truly develop a therapeutic relationship with a patient, I must be able to differentiate between my own thoughts/emotions and the situation. I have to be able to know what I think and believe about myself and yet not push my own thoughts and beliefs onto my patient. I have to be able to recognise that my patient’s strengths and ways of coping will be different than my own. In my experience this ties into the idea that we all possess a “shared humanness”. While we share a lot of the same emotions, experiences, desires etc.; each one of us is unique and individual. While we all have different strengths and ways of coping with the challenges of life, we all still share the experience of being human. Therefore, we can offer each other grace, knowing that we are in many ways the same.

A patient’s journey can be made easier by having a nurse who will walk alongside them, who understands that human experience; a nurse who has her/himself faced challenges and experienced a range of emotions; a nurse who can relate to them, and also recognise their uniqueness. It takes an emotionally intelligent, competent nurse to do this. It takes someone who has explored their own thoughts and beliefs; someone who is not only able to recognise their own strengths, but can also recognise the individual strength of their patient.