Practice Nurses and their role in Quality & Safety
The excerpt below is a paraphrase from an interview with a practice nurse.
“We had this girl come in. She just appeared in the surgery in tears and I took her into the treatment room. Anyway she was suicidal and at that stage we didn’t have our other practice nurse as well, but you just have to prioritise. She needed me until I could get a doctor to her. So I just put everything into looking after her and that’s where the team works so well, because the girls out the front just said “We’ve got a medical emergency. The nurse will ring you back.” They just kept taking phone numbers and saying, “She’ll ring you back,” because I couldn’t be disturbed. This girl had come in and she was in a crisis. So anyway in the end I got the doctor to take over and that was it. As it turned out then I had to, sort of, do a lot of following up and ringing for them while they were with her.”
We are interested in what other practice nurses think about this situation. In particular:
How did the nurse's actions contribute to quality and safety?
What is the nurse's role in the team?
What role does the doctor play? Is it appropriate?
What does this say about access to services?
posted by AGPNSadmin @ 1:48 pm
1 comments
1 Comments:
the nurses role here is to 1) comfort and support and calm. 2)attempt to extract information from the distressed pt that would assist the Drs assessment and management. i.e. observations, social Hx, recent medical Hx etc. 3) Contact family/significant others if appropriate4) Dr would then assess to determine/exclude any 'pathological' cause for pts distress and Tx accordingly. If not then 5) nurse would refer pt to counsellor/psychologist/family member as appropriate. 6) This collaborative approach improves the safety and quality of the service
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