Primary Nursing Essay

951 Words2 Pages

Primary Nursing
Primary nursing made its emergence in the early 1960’s. This care model developed as nurses strived to provide direct care. Primary nursing also labeled relationship- based nursing to fortify the relationship between the nurse, the patient and the patient’s family. The efficacy of the nursing process is also to be credited for the implementation of this model of care delivery. (Tiedeman, Lookinland 2004).
The conceptual framework of primary nursing model is to reduce fragmented care and to promote continuity in the delivery of patient care. Thus, in this model, a nurse was expected to have 24X7 responsibility and accountability. This accountability was to extend for the complete extent of the patient’s stay in the hospital. Here, the nurse assumes the authority and responsibility to collaborate with the patients and their families towards assessing, planning, organizing, implementing, coordinating, and evaluating complete comprehensive care. It promotes the concept of patient–center-care. The primary nurse is empowered to determine as to how the patient care needs to be administered and the primary nurse, wherever feasible, administers it personally.
The cornerstone of this model of care is that the primary nurse is autonomously responsible for the plan of care during a patient’s length of hospital stay. This nurse is also privy to the entire patient’s information and is also responsible for communicating the information received to the physicians and others who are involved in the care of this patient. In this instance the nurse is advocating for the patient and creating a pathway for the patient’s course of care. (Manthey, Kramer 2007) As recommended, a nurse who is engaged in this mode of care is expected t...

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...t at Beth Israel. (Vitello, 2011)
In the era of corporate merging and cost cutting, primary nursing was no longer financially feasible. (O'Connor, 2004). The financial ramification

In conclusion, one can say, based on most of the studies of comparison between, primary nursing and other models like team nursing and functional nursing, that in primary nursing, the nurses were found to be providing better quality of service, a better patient outcome was observed, at least as some patients reported more satisfaction, when assigned to a particular nurse. Since nurses were empowered to assume more authority, they found more opportunities in bringing innovation to their services, resulting from more and better involvement. However, due to the nature of service as required in primary nursing model, this service tends to prove more costly as compared to other models.

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