Looking to the Future: Critical Pathways

Chapter 8: Looking to the Future - Critical Pathways

Overview:

• Focuses on the importance of nursing documentation in terms of guarding against loss of information, ensuring consistency of care and more
• Includes reproduced copies of numerous pathways
• Provides examples of avoidable and unavoidable variances or deviations from established pathways

Description:

This chapter educates nurses on critical pathways; multidisciplinary patient-care tools used in case management models to co-ordinate and facilitate the efficient and effective management of various patient groups. It informs on the importance of pathways and includes reproduced copies of various pathways.

Topics:

• What Nurses Write
  • The Single Clinical Record
  • Why Document?
  • To Care Or Treat?
• A Better Way
  • Critical Pathways
• Documentation Packages
• Professional Issues
• In Summary
• References
• Suggested Reading

Chris Page RGON, ADN, BN
Chris has been a nurse for 24 years. She has worked in Australia, New Zealand and Britain, including nine years as a medical charge nurse. In 1993, in her role as clinical support for a division of Health Waikato, a New Zealand Crown Health Enterprise, Chris was responsible for developing and introducing integrated clinical pathways. Following New Zealand’s health reforms and health restructuring she took up her current role as policy facilitator for Health Waikato.

Chris’s passion is to ensure nursing input is acknowledged as an integral part of client care. She challenges nurses to evaluate whether the nursing theories of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are an appropriate basis for current nursing practice. Chris believes health organisations can only benefit from adopting case management and using critical pathways to co-ordinate and facilitate the efficient and effective management of patients’ episodes of care.

Professional Reviews: