Summary: Critical Care Outreach Nurse

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Critical Care Outreach Nurse

Introduction
Within the last ten years an increased demand of contemporary healthcare has created a shift in nursing. This shift has created a need to strengthen the quality and safety of practice, in addition to re-examining the clinical roles within nursing (Delamaine and Lafortune, 2010). In order to respond to the requirements of contemporary healthcare, advanced practice nursing (APN) roles or ‘specialist nursing roles’ have evolved over the years and are currently a global trend of the nursing profession (Kleinpell et al., 2014). As a third year student nurse, I have aspirations of achieving a specialist nurse status within my career. Over the past three years I have experienced a wide variety of clinical …show more content…

The critical to success report identified that there was a two way interaction between critical care units and the rest of the hospital. Poor care or bed management outside critical care units (CCU) can unnecessarily inflate the demand for critical care beds and vice versa, poor critical care unit management can inflate costs and affect whole trust performance, for example, if unit beds are full because some patients have been admitted unnecessarily or have not been discharged safely (Audit Commission, 1999). With the publication of the Critical to success report, the Department of Health (2000) conducted a review of adult critical care services. Upon review of Adult Critical Care Nursing, the review concluded that each critically ill patient, wherever they are located in the hospital should have skilled critical care nursing available either to care directly for them, or to advise on the care required to meet their needs. Furthermore it was recommended that outreach services need to be developed as an integral part of every NHS trusts critical care service (Department of Health, 2000). As a direct result of both reports and increased media pressure at the time highlighting lack of investment to …show more content…

The role of the CCON work from a spectrum of different service models across the NHS, therefore, making overall evaluation of the role difficult. The CCON appears to fill in gaps according to local need and not all NHS hospitals have them (Rowan, 2013). In some cases it is beyond the capabilities to provide outreach services across all trust sites in the UK because of resources and staffing restrictions (McGloin and McLoed,

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