Expanding the Scope of Advanced Family Nurse Practitioners in Healthcare Delivery

Introduction

Understanding the role that a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) plays in the promotion of health allows maximizing the extent of a positive outcome achieved when working to address the health concerns of a particular family. Moreover, from the perspective of family members, developing an insight into the nature of an FNP’s work will lead to improved communication and collaboration with an FNP, thus enhancing the quality of delivered care.

Consequently, it is essential to establish a proper understanding of the extent of an FNP’s roles and responsibilities. Due to the increased opportunity for off-site care and the chance to perform a greater number of walk-in visits, FNPs can engage patients in the process of elaborate and continuous self-care by building a rapport with them. Therefore, the role of an FNP can be seen as one of promoting patient care and the enhancement of awareness about health-related concerns within families, thus creating chances to manage family-related health issues more effectively.

A Nonclinical Perspective: Promoting Patient Outcomes

When evaluating the role of an FNP, one is likely to encounter it in a nonclinical setting due to the range of roles and responsibilities that an FNP plays. Indeed, focusing on the consultations- and education-related aspects of their job, an FNP has to address the issues that lie outside the clinical setting, such as patient education and the assessment of the threats to which the members of a particular family are exposed (Bergh, Friberg, Persson, & Dahlborg-Lyckhage, 2015).

For an FNP, it is critical to focus on enhancing collaboration within a family in question and ensure that the values thereof should change toward accepting crucial health management skills and philosophies. Accomplishing the identified goal requires managing a vast range of misconceptions and prejudices against certain approaches toward health management, as well as the lack of awareness concerning health threats. As an FNP, one has to ensure that the process of self-education and self-directed health management should start with introducing parents to the process of tending to the needs of infants and continue to expand the process of care by embracing other relevant topics.

The resulting increase in patient safety, as well as the access to the relevant health-related data sources, will allow handling some of the most common family and public health concerns. Furthermore, with the use of off-site care strategies and the emphasis on the significance of walk-in visits, an FNP can develop patient-specific approaches toward promoting well-being in specific communities and families (Swan, Ferguson, Chang, Larson, & Smaldone, 2015).

The subsequent increase in communication quality between a nurse and a patient will drive the levels of care to an APN level, providing the foundation for implementing culture-specific approaches in preventing diseases on family and community levels.

Applying an Advanced Nursing Practice Concept

As an FNP, one will also have to focus on integrating the principles of ANP care into the FNP practice in order to address relevant health issues promptly and provide families with immediate access to care. From the perspective of the APN concept, an FNP has to manage the problem of patient education by examining it from the standpoint of several discourses, including the economic, cultural, and technological ones.

For instance, the range of financial opportunities that families in disadvantaged neighborhoods have are restricted, which suggests that an FNP has to tailor their recommendations for health management to the capacities of a particular family. Options for receiving additional health-related assistance have to be sought, which may involve the development of family-oriented programs and the enhancement of family health education (Bond et al., 2017). Moreover, the APN perspective implies the need to cater to patients from a variety of backgrounds, which means that the quality of the nurse-patient dialogue must remain high.

Ten Questions to Ask

The person to be interviewed is an FPN in a local healthcare facility. Being also a DNP, Ms. Lyndon is a certified professional who has years of experience in managing patients’ needs. Ms. Lyndon will be interviewed on May 20, 2019. When addressing the problem of managing health on a family level, one should consider the necessity to delve into the specifics of promoting patient education and addressing the presence of health-related myths. The following questions can be asked to an FNP:

1. How can families from different cultural backgrounds be accessed?
2. Should an FNP encourage the process of such patients’ acculturation?
3. How should the process of cross-cultural care occur?
4. What challenges does primary care include?
5. How can an FNP overcome these challenges?
6. What are dangerous myths concerning health management most popular among patients?
7. How can an FNP subvert these myths?
8. What strategies should an FNP utilize to ensure patient-nurse collaboration?
9. How can economic discourse be established in managing diverse families’ health needs?
10. What changes should be made to the current programs for managing families’ health issues?

Conclusion

Due to the opportunity to embrace the needs of a particular family, an FNP has extra opportunities for enhancing self-care among patients, thus leading to improved patient education and better control of the target population’s health. Therefore, the role of an FNP should be regarded as crucial in creating premises for better health management. Furthermore, due to the extensive opportunities for establishing a culture of health management within families and, on a greater scale, within communities, an FNP has greater chances to reach out to vulnerable groups.

Starting with the primary care and the education of parents, an FNP continues to promote health awareness within a family to invite all members thereof to accept healthy behaviors. Thus, the role of an FNP includes education, health promotion, provision of critical health services, and prevention of possible threats to target demographics’ health.

References

Bergh, A. L., Friberg, F., Persson, E., & Dahlborg-Lyckhage, E. (2015). Registered nurses’ patient education in everyday primary care practice: Managers’ discourses. Global Qualitative Nursing Research, 2, 1-12. Web.

Bond, W. F., Gonzalez, H. C., Funk, A. M., Fehr, L. S., McGarvey, J. S., Svendsen, J. D., & Sawicki, R. (2017). Deliberate practice with standardized patient actors and the development of formative feedback for Advance Care Planning facilitators. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 20(6), 631-637. Web.

Swan, M., Ferguson, S., Chang, A., Larson, E., & Smaldone, A. (2015). Quality of primary care by advanced practice nurses: A systematic review. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 27(5), 396-404. Web.