Theories for Advanced Nursing Practice

1. Examine disciplinary influences on nursing inquiry such as biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, among others.

2. Describe application and adaptation of borrowed theories to nursing practice.

Discussion Question: 6 DQ 1

Discuss “Envisioning Recovery” as an overarching framework for practice development and focus for all health care treatment.

The role of practice development in healthcare is the facilitation of continuous upgrading and improvement of healthcare services. Envisioning recovery is a novel archetype in healthcare that reflects on a model scenario where sustainable changes in health centers is burgeoning renewed interest in innovation and the demonstration of impact from transforming healthcare services.

Practice development in healthcare is enabled by authentically engaging innovation, ingenious skills, resourceful imagination, and practical wisdom in introducing transformative shifts in hospital culture, and embedding these improvements into health fruitful outcomes. Healthcare recovery in essence means that all practices that are redundant, unnecessary, and found to impede progress in imparting safe and patient-focused care are expunged and replaced by newer and enhanced processes. Bovenkamp and Zuiderent-Jerak (2015) posit that experiential knowledge gathered from the experiences of nurses, physicians, patients, and other hospital staff and stakeholders is crucial in designing strategies for change of healthcare provision approaches.

Mahmud, Olander, Eriksnn, and Haglund (2013) place communication advances in health as the key to the promotion of interventions that incorporate ‘recovery envisioning’ into the health industry. In précis, they engage health literacy by asserting that informatics improvement is the primal foundations that abundantly take health industry paradigms to exemplary levels where patient-centered care delivers palatable wellbeing to patients.

Recovery in healthcare is best achieved by placing considerable reliance on healthcare informatics that is managed by practice development units. These units work in cohorts with researchers and healthcare policymakers who determine amicable paths for instilling change of infrastructure, methods, and procedures. Wholesomely, recovery in healthcare industry marks shifts of healthcare delivery to superior standards and better focus on patients.

It is so important for patients to participate in their healthcare and assist in making decisions for them, as that is the only way services can be tailored to their needs; without patient interest and participation, the interventions are likely to fail.  Patients know what they interventions absolutely won’t work for them and need to be encouraged to speak up and state that fact; however, that is a very difficult task for many people, especially depending on age or culture.  It is the responsibility of the healthcare team to ensure the environment they are providing is one of open communication and respect and there the team also needs to encourage patient participation.

People living with mental illnesses and/or addictions want to have hope, eliminate or manage their symptoms, increase their capacity to participate in valued social roles and relationships, embrace purpose and meaning in their lives, and make worthwhile contributions to the lives of their communities.

Recovery-oriented care is based on the recognition that each person must be either the agent of and/or the central participant within his or her own recovery journey, and that all services therefore need to be organized to support the developmental stages of this recovery process. It follows that services also should instill hope, be person-and family-centered, offer choice, elicit and honor each person’s potential for growth, build on a person’s/family’s strengths and interests, and attend to the overall life, including health and wellness, of a person with mental illness and/or addiction.

Discussion Question: 6 DQ 2

How can the knowledge of economic theory be utilized by advanced practice nurses? How can economic theory be applied in analysis of interventions?

The realization that economic theory plays a crucial role in the management of patients may promote the adoption of effective methodologies of nursing administration among advanced practice nurses. Economic theory is a decision-making model for how people allocate scarce resources.  The goal of economic theory is accurate prediction of the choices people make regarding resource allocation. Among the main elements of economic models are the concepts of scarcity, utility, cost, supply, demand, price, and marginal analysis. (Jones & Yoder, 2010). The US healthcare system, for example, focuses on value-based practicing (VBP) to ensure it provides high quality healthcare, incurs low loses, and meets the customer’s expectations (Turkel & Ray, 2000). Therefore, by embracing economic principles of the economic theory, an advanced practice nurse in the can ensure that the fundamental precepts of VBP are met. Also, the nurse can advise other nurses on the steps to take to provide quality healthcare to the patients. Ultimately, the proliferation of the economic theory amongst advanced practice nurses will promote the continuity of the health institution and enhance efficiency in healthcare provision.

The knowledge of economic theory in nursing can help nurses manage scarce resources such as time. When a nurse is allocated a specific amount of time based on the patient’s needs, the nurse should ensure that each patient acquires quality care (Jones & Yoder, 2010). Consequently, the nurse will find it easy to determine which interventions are logical, time-saving, and effective. By considering the time allocated to each patient, a nurse can also develop effective intervention techniques with help of evidence-based practice. Therefore, EBP can help the nurses improve the quality of care and satisfy the needs of each patient.

Economic theory suggests that nurse managers would incorporate marginal analysis when making decisions regarding resource input and production output. Few would argue that scarcity of resources plagues our current healthcare environment. Reports of missed nursing care and rationing of nursing care because of inadequate staff now appear in the literature with increasing frequency. Decisions regarding allocation of nursing care significantly impact the financial performance of hospitals, the job satisfaction of nurses, and most importantly, the health outcomes of patients. (Jones & Yoder, 2010).

An advanced practice nurse may also determine the success of a health care system and provide recommendations to improve the quality of care based on the analysis of the healthcare system using the precepts of the economic theory.

Public health care reforms are often at odds with the realities of government economic policies. Nurses should understand economic arguments put forth to better understand the benefits and pitfalls of proposed reforms. Competition in health care is particularly problematic because economic principles of competition are often misapplied. Modern economic thought developed as society industrialized and sought to understand exchange of scare resources. Why would economics as a science cease to exist without the concept of scarcity?

Scarcity and Health Care Economics:

Scarcity is the key component of economics and means having too few resources to satisfy the needs and wants of humankind. Without scarcity, the science of economics would not exist because there would be no need to make choices or tradeoffs. Choices made to overcome scarcity via alternatives are of particular interest to economists. Contemporary economics can be broadly divided into two fields: (1) Microeconomics: Behaviors in individual markets and small economic units to understand their behavior within the market; and (2) Macroeconomics: The “big picture” market that consider aggregate functions of all markets

Health care economics is a recently developed specialized field and is differentiated by the level of government intervention, intractable uncertainty, asymmetrical information, and externalities it involves.  Uncertainties in particular lead to inefficient resource allocation in health care that forces non-market institutions to compensate for inequalities.