5 Ways Registered Nurses Can Advocate For Their Patients

1,943 Comments / Job Seekers, Medical Staffing / By adminpost / March 3, 2022 March 3, 2022

What is patient advocacy, or what is advocating for patients nursing? It’s a job that can be performed by a registered nurse or healthcare nurse. They are responsible for encouraging and supporting a group or community. Several registered nurses anticipate advocacy as one of the most significant roles for patient care. They have to keep in mind that they are supposed to serve patients best. Most people are unaware of the term “patient advocacy,” so we will discuss what it is and how can a nurse advocate for a patient. So, without any delay, let’s get started:

What Is Patient Advocacy?

Patient advocacy supports patients during their tough times and educates them about their actual health conditions. In addition to their specialty, all registered nurses have an obligation to speak up for their patients. However, many healthcare nurses don’t educate their patients about their current condition and what to do. Still, they undertake the responsibility to support the rights of people in their care.

How Registered Nurses Advocates For Their Patients

How can registered nurses advocate for patients daily? Here are a few instances of nurses role in patient advocacy:

Make Sure Patient’s Safety

Being a registered nurse, you need to ensure that your patient is safe while receiving treatment in a hospitality or healthcare facility. After they get discharged, they must be contacted by interacting with social workers or case managers about the patient’s requirement for home health assistance. If a patient needs further help, they should always be there for their patients.

Educate Your Patients About Their Condition

A registered nurse advocate for patients and tells them how to handle their present chronic health condition to enhance the quality of their daily life. It is a necessary way for registered nurses to bring a change. Patients receiving chemotherapy can take advantage of the registered nurse educating them how to take their anti-nausea drug to be most useful for them and let them feel better during cancer treatments.

Registered nurses explain how crucial and useful a present medical summary is throughout the healthcare facility admission process. You can offer documents as a sample or vital details like allergies, health conditions, physicians, medication listings, and their dosages.

Registered nurses should acquire personal health knowledge. Legal, medical sources offer patients bountiful expertise related to medications, diagnoses, and procedures.

Protect Patients’ Rights

There is another way nurses advocate for patients. It is by understanding their desires. This might include interaction with patients with a tough family member who might bicker on the patient’s preferences and could eventually upset the patient.

Cross-Check For Errors

Nurse advocacy for patients also has something to do with avoiding errors. Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s their responsibility to detect, stop, and fix mistakes. Registered nurses should see clashing information, orders, and oversights by physicians and other staff caring for the patient. Registered nurses should read the previous documentation and cross-check with other registered nurses. Do call the doctor if you find something suspicious before offering chemotherapy.

Connect Patients To Resources

A registered nurse role in patient advocacy is to assist patients in locating resources inside or outside the healthcare facility to aid their well-being. You should be aware of resources available in the community that you can suggest to your patients, such as financial assistance, patient or caregiver support networks, transportation, or assisting them in meeting other requirements.

The above-given just how registered nurses advocate for their patients– as a registered nurse, you pose a great opportunity to get equal treatment, protect patients’ rights, and have liberty from suffering for your patients.

Patient Advocacy Resources

Patient advocacy takes experience, time, and education to become a good patient advocate. So, we recommend you join any online or offline class related to this field. Skilled lecturers can help you become a strong advocate for your patients under your care.

Nursing Ethics That Encourages Patient Advocacy

There are a few provisions established in the ANACE or American Nurses Association Code of Ethics that mention many guidelines that are directly related to patient advocacy:

Commit primarily to the patient
Respect human dignity
Protect the patients’ rights
Treat all patients equal
Have empathy

You’ll detect several opportunities to advocate for patients throughout your healthcare nursing career. It’s necessary to practice assertiveness and tact to get your point across.

Interprofessional Strategic Planning

Healthcare has become highly complex, challenging healthcare providers and doctors to adapt to the ever-evolving environment and respond to the unstable stipulations for strategic planning. In unstable environments, medical professionals require additional skills. Interprofessional strategic planning skills can help registered nurses become better advocates for their patients.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership has been proven to be specifically useful in uncertain and turbulent environments, such as the situations found in today’s healthcare facilities. Even though not every healthcare facility can achieve Magnet status, registered nurses can understand how to use the postulates of transformational leadership to assist a professional medicine practice environment that eventually results in great patient care.

Patients’ advocacy doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Patient care can get affected by the environment of the healthcare facility and the staff who are providing that care. This means registered nurses should have the time to do this and become familiar with patients’ requirements, communicate, and follow-through.

Since the healthcare industry is getting more complex, as a consequence, patients depend more on the nurses, doctors, or healthcare providers to instruct and assist them through this puzzle. A registered nurse that can rightly advocate for patients makes the best possible case for success and is a real asset to their community and organization.

If you are a registered nurse and looking for a lucrative opportunity in your field, I’Kare Consulting Firm would be glad to serve you. We are looking forward to having words with potential candidates and offering options for a healthcare facility that meets their requirements and a good salary package. Reach out to us right away.