iCARE Assignment
The interprofessional teams are currently present and developing in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). According to ANA (2015), interprofessional care stands for care implemented by a healthcare team, which includes professionals with different expertise. Their roles and obligations are overlapping in practice, while everybody has a unique contribution. For instance, case managers take care of patients after their discharge, while social workers assist case managers by finding community resources and helping in durable medical measures. Moreover, such professionals as speech and language pathologists and respiratory care practitioners conduct occupational, physical, and speech therapy to evaluate physical condition, swallowing capabilities, and motor strengths. Furthermore, nurses and physicians have interconnected roles as an essential part of the ICU. Nowadays, excellent patient care is not possible without a proper teamwork level, so communication between team members is critical (Donovan et al., 2018). One of the improvements needed for ICU is the development of communication quality between nurses and physicians.
Compassion
Compassion is a virtuous response by practitioners that aimed to address the needs and suffering of a patient with the help of action and relational understanding. In general, compassion is usually expected to occur in interactions between patients and healthcare providers and also among providers. The nursing practice requires compassionate care in collaboration with other members of the care unit team. Compassionate communication ability is something that can be learned by a nurse and becomes intuitive with practice. It includes gestures and cues such as active listening, open body language, eye contact, taking notes to understand patients, and informing them with sensitivity (Prentice et al., 2015). The ICU deals with patients at high risk for death, so nurses need to apply a compassionate approach while attending to patients and providing them with constant assistance during recovery. The ICU will be better off when nurses disseminate compassionate communication among their colleagues. Patients usually are in their most vulnerable moments, so intimate care should be provided to them.
Advocacy
Advocacy is based on the patient-nurse relationship and occurs when the patient’s autonomy and freedoms are in question. Nurses play an essential role in healthcare advocacy, helping patients or their representatives to make decisions in the patient’s best interest. The nursing advocacy obligations consist of communicating information, offering recommendations, and advising in order to help patients make their own deliberate decision (ANA, 2015). Nurses have to maintain a caring relationship with patients in order to become a moral agents in a trusting atmosphere favorable for recovery.
Critical care nurses are obliged to respect the patient’s rights, beliefs, decisions, and autonomy within their role as patient advocates. This respect can be spotted when nurses conduct a sensitive dialog with patients regarding their values and decisions. Following such conversations, nurses became the main communicators of the patient’s interests and goals to the family members and the healthcare team in order to develop an appropriate plan of care (Donovan et al., 2018). For instance, the nurse has to document the patient’s wishes to honor them in such cases as prolonged mechanical ventilation and intubation. However, successful advocacy requires collaboration and reciprocal interaction of all ICU practitioners.
Resilience
Nurses, who work in the ICU, very often suffer from workplace stress, which can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Workplace stress is threatening patient care quality because it increases staff turnover and affects job satisfaction. The approach of bouncing back after adversity or stress at the workplace is called resilience (Mealer et al., 2017). It consists of three main elements: growth, sustainability, and recovery. Resilience cannot reveal the psychological level of the whole team because individual levels may differ due to various environmental issues. Practitioners with a high level of resilience are believed to be less predisposed to psychological distress, burnout, and issues during everyday work. Resilience intervention programs should be applied to elevate their emotional well-being and self-confidence. The intensive care nurses have to enjoy open communication with other staff applying notions of hope, optimist, and a sense of humor during their clinical activity.
Evidence-Based Practice
Evidence-based practice means that healthcare teams are obliged to apply the best possible evidence and current knowledge in order to make decisions on appropriate patient care. The nursing experts have to perform research on how to care for patients taking into consideration clinical expertise and patient preferences (ANA, 2015). Nowadays, EBP has grown into the most popular tool that transforms research into practice to avoid outdated methods of care. The role of a nurse in EBP could be seen in the following example. The teenager was admitted to ICU due to the accidental intake of an organophosphorus compound. The nurses decided to inject atropine following their past experience and expertise, but the patient started to suffer respiratory paralysis in some hours. This paralysis could also be foreseen based on the expertise, so the nurse put the patient on mechanical ventilation. Nevertheless, the main question of how to treat that type of poisoning arose. In that case, the nurse has to identify a question, assist in its research, and share individual findings with colleagues in order to find interprofessional EBP.
Summary
To conclude, if ICU staff wants to maximize optimal clinical outcomes, its care should depend on advocacy, resilience, compassion, and be in line with evidence-based practice to improve communication among health practitioners. The main iCARE components contribute to better collaboration among clinicians in terms of overlapped patient care. Those elements increase the quality of care, which in turn reflects improved patient outcomes. Nurses play the most important role because they should operate within those principles and bind other team members together.
References
American Nurses Association. (2015). Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice (3rd ed.). Author.
Donovan, A. L., Aldrich, J. M., Gross, A. K., Barchas, D. M., Thornton, K. C., Schell-Chaple, H. M., Gropper, M.A., Lipshutz, A. K. (2018). Interprofessional care and teamwork in the ICU. Critical care medicine, 46(6), 980-990.
Mealer, M., Hodapp, R., Conrad, D., Dimidjian, S., Rothbaum, B. O., & Moss, M. (2017). Designing a resilience program for critical care nurses. AACN advanced critical care, 28(4), 359-365.
Prentice, D., Engel, J., Taplay, K., & Stobbe, K. (2015). Interprofessional collaboration: The experience of nursing and medical students’ interprofessional education. Global qualitative nursing research.