Nursing Care Processes

Abstract

Care processes are the primary mechanisms through which healthcare providers influence health outcomes for clients and families. Consequently, care processes play a central role in quality assessment and performance improvement initiatives, especially nursing care processes. Nurses engage in care processes to diagnose and treat client responses to health problems and engage in interdisciplinary care interventions prescribed by other disciplines. Moreover, nurses are primarily responsible for care coordination activities within and across healthcare teams. Thus, there are few care elements that do not pass through nurses’ hands, and few client outcomes that are not influenced by nursing care processes. Despite the relevance of nursing care processes to quality assessment and performance improvement initiatives, few robust nursing process quality indicators are available. In this chapter, the complex nature of nursing processes known as nursing care interventions in the Quality Health Outcomes Model (QHOM) is examined. Specifically, nursing interventions at the client and the system level are addressed, and two specific nursing interventions, nurse surveillance and symptom management, are examined as exemplars.