Nursing care varies from carrying out sophisticated procedures to simple tasks all aimed at providing comfort, care, certainty to the patients and promoting the overall well being of the patients. Semachew (2018) recognizes nurses as key care givers in the health care setting with the ability to influence the quality of patient’s care, treatment and outcome. Despite nurses having enormous amount of knowledge on their nursing process, several factors hinder their performance with one of those factors being the model of patient care delivery. The organization of health care delivery is influenced by a variety of variables such as availability of staff, economic cost, specific patient population and presence or absence of good management. Patient care delivery models have been in place for the last several decades and can be classified basically as traditional and non-traditional models (Bailin, 2019). According to Bailin (2019), traditional models include total patient care, functional nursing, team nursing and primary care while non traditional method include AC Health mobile care.
Total patient care has been in place for a long time and involves nurses overseeing every aspect of patient care working in shifts to cover everything from personal hygiene to medications whereas functional nursing uses a pecking order in which highly qualified and skilled nurses deal with complicated cases leaving junior nurses to handle basic tasks. Similarly, team nursing operates on the same principles as functional nursing with a distinction that the team leader assigns duties to other nurses (Bailin, 2019). On the other hand, primary care nursing adopts a holistic patient care approach with a single qualified nurse taking care of the patient throughout the hospital stay. With evolution of the patients’ needs, development of more recent methods such as AC Health mobile care which utilizes a mobile app have become feasible due to advancement in technology. However, in this piece of writing, I have selected the team nursing model to be used to upgrade my organization’s nursing units.
Team nursing despite originating in 1950s and 1960s cannot be said to be antiquated. From Dickerson & Latina (2017), team nursing model of care involves putting together nurses who work as a team to provide patient care. Although team nursing care model was developed in mid-20th century, its benefits are still felt up to date. It utilizes the diversity of skills, education and qualification level of the entire staff with supervision from a senior nurse who delegates the duties (Dickerson & Latina, 2017). This model of care is therefore necessary but not ideal for integrated care delivery. The following paragraphs discusses its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Strengths
No single model of health care delivery has been shown to be perfect in improving both efficacy and efficiency of nursing care. Nevertheless, team nursing care model has been shown to increase staff satisfaction rates. Dickerson & Latina (2017) in their study compares the staff satisfaction rate before and after implementation of team nursing and the results were 61% and 72% respectively reporting an 11% increase. This satisfaction was a consequence of support the novice nurses received from their senior colleagues. The same study also documented an increase in the compliance rate following adoption of team nursing to 88%. Team nursing also increases accountability among individual nurses as noted by Dickerson & Latina (2017) from 38% to 58% accountability. In addition to the above benefits, team nursing provides an opportunity for skill and career development as novice nurses acquire more skills by working together with experienced nurses and sharing of knowledge among themselves. In this model also, each member of the team participates in decision making and problem solving which improves the quality of decisions putting in mind the available expertise and mix of skills (Rosen et al., 2018). Moreover, patient satisfaction has been shown to improve when nurses work as a team as the client is able to identify the personnel taking care of him. Other benefits of team nursing are reduced workload due to division of labor, minimal barriers between profession and non-profession workers and facilitated continuity of care provided the teams are constant.
Weaknesses
Working together as a team has always proved to be beneficial however it also comes with its challenges. The model is very feeble in that it greatly depends on the individual team members and their cooperation. One of its weakness is lack of effective communication. Communication is always essential in any organization and its breakdown in health care has catastrophic consequences. Rosen et al. (2018) pinpoints out communication failure as an independent ca
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