While in the care of a nurse, patients have a champion: a health care professional working to assure timely tests, procedures, and rehabilitative activities that foster better and faster recovery. Prior to discharge from a health facility, it is often the nurse who assesses a patient’s self-care ability (or access to home caregivers) to provide the type of treatments and medications needed to prevent relapse or even costly return to a hospital.
Responsibility for optimal recovery is of course shared by all health team members, but the unique position of nurses at the patient’s bedside (literally and metaphorically) gives us many avenues to influence care and cure.
Though nurses already play a central role in cost containment, care quality, and patient safety, current trends in nursing education have us poised for even greater contributions. That’s because good baccalaureate and graduate programs in nursing increasingly incorporate quality improvement in care settings. Through attention to ‘microsystem’ processes, we work toward better outcomes not only for individuals but also for health systems as a whole. Nursing prepares leaders, administrators, and researchers who can improve care processes and related analytics around outcomes and cost.
The coming enactment of reforms included in the Affordable Care Act will increase the opportunities for nurses to make both individuals and care systems as healthy as they can possibly be. Patient communication, preventive care, and navigation across the vast medical landscape are well-established foci in the curriculum at major U.S. nursing schools. These areas of expertise could not be more essential now that new insurance options and Medicaid expansion are bringing millions of individuals into a national primary care system already taxed by provider shortages.
Nurse navigators and transitional care nurses are stepping up to central coordinating roles within Accountable Care Organizations—the model wherein participating health care providers are collectively responsible for their enrollees’ care, and also can share savings resulting from efficiency and improvements in that care.
Nursing as a profession actively engages in leading efforts to improve patient care and reduce costs; this is integral to our professional values, knowledge base, and skills. We have earned the trust of Americans (we’re voted most ethical and honest in Gallup polls), and will use that trust, along with our health promotion expertise, to communicate with patients about the best prevention, timely care, and most efficient ways to get needed help as they navigate together through America’s evolving system of care.
Kathleen Potempa, PhD, RN, FAAN, is the Dean of the University of Michigan School of Nursing and a national leader in health promotion, nursing education, and research. Dr. Potempa is the immediate past president of the American Associate of Colleges of Nursing and recently concluded a four-year term on the NIH’s National Institute of Nursing Research Council.
