In the Spotlight
Home Care
Kathleen Klaasen, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Home Care Program
We asked Kathleen Klaasen to provide some suggestions and ideas to inspire nurses who work in home care about how they can help facilitate improved patient flow. Here are her thoughts:
Getting people home
To look at patient flow, we need to keep people from entering hospital unnecessarily and get them home as quickly as possible.
Home care plays an integral role in that. The goal is to get people home as quickly as possible and intervene at the community level. By offering services in the client's home, we are enabling earlier discharge from hospital, or in some cases avoiding a hospital visit or stay. With our intervention, the services they receive may mean they don't need to access emergency or acute care.
Maximizing resources
Home care nurses provide education on managing chronic diseases, connect people to other services and work with them to maximize their health in the community.
There is an early emphasis on discharge planning and client teaching to promote self care. In case reviews, we talk about how we can support people to be independent. Can we teach them or their family? We take a rehabilitative and restorative approach.
Home care nurses constantly ask themselves - What does this person need for nursing services? How can we meet the person's care needs efficiently? Ensuring the number of times the nurses are seeing a person is appropriate allows us to maximize nursing services and see other clients.