Collaborative Nursing: Fill & Download for Free

The principles of collaborative nursing are:This is obviously a school assignment for you and you’re trying to get somebody else to do your work. :-)Your best bet is to put “principles of collaborative nursing” with quotation marks, into Google and see what you come up with.Excellent nurses do their own work and learn from it! Good luck. :-)(see comments for more info.)Edited to add: As of 6/5/18, Quora has blocked my posts from most feeds due to a controversial post I wrote on that day that started to go viral (1300 views within about an hour then views for ALL my posts suddenly slowed to a trickle). Please go to my profile and scroll down to read my posts. Please consider following me in order to see my posts. Thanks!

An acquaintance of mine (who doesn’t work in health care) recently spent some time at a local hospital, when his wife went in for surgery. He expressed his surprise to me after she was released: “I never knew nurses did so much! They actually RUN the hospital!”While this isn’t quite accurate, it certainly is true that nurses manage the hospital units and have a lot to do with setting clinical policies. Not only do they “assist” doctors; they’re also the ones who care for the patients and serve as the doctors’ eyes and ears during the 23.75 hours per day that the doctor isn’t at the patient’s bedside. In the ER where I work, nurses work with standing orders, and are expected to implement them when a patient presents with certain symptoms, and the doctor isn’t readily available. Nurses are trained to run a code (cardiac or respiratory arrest) in the event the doctor can’t be there immediately.Nurses do follow doctors’ orders, but they also are responsible for questioning orders that seem inappropriate or unsafe. I wouldn’t so much say that the nurse’s job is to help the doctor, or that the doctor’s job is to help the nurse——I would say that nurses and doctors collaborate, each within their own area of expertise, to help the patient.

I was a student nurse rotating through a semi-rural hospital here in Alaska. I had a patient who was quite elderly, had suffered a stroke, and had been placed on an NG (nasogastric) feeding tube. She pulled the tube out, bridle and all, twice over the night shift. When I came in, one of the doctors had left orders to put it back in for a third time…I watched two floor nurses go into her room, stand on either side of her bed, and lean down near her face to ask her “Mrs [so and so], the doctor says we need to put your feeding tube back in. Can we go ahead and do that?” The woman was slowly shaking her head back and forth (that’s a no, in case you can’t tell) but not really saying anything. They asked again. The head shaking continued. They asked AGAIN, louder this time, and she replied “OKAY.” The nurses turned to me, threw their hands up, and said “Alright, call your instructor and go ahead and put it in.”Now even as a “lowly” student nurse I knew something was amiss here. It was pretty clear to me that this woman absolutely did not want a feeding tube and with no family at the bedside to collaborate with, I just didn’t feel right replacing it. Luckily about an hour or so later her daughter, and POA, arrived. I went in and discussed the situation with her. The daughter begins to tell me that her mother was unhappy with her quality of life before her stroke and that she never wanted to live this way. She didn’t think her mother wanted the feeding tube, but was going along with it because of the pressure to do so from the rest of the family. We conversed some more and I left the room.So my instructor shows up not long after I talked to the daughter (she had about 8 of us students scattered throughout the hospital and had been busy with others). She says to me “Alright did you get your supplies ready? Let’s get in there and do this.” I took a deep breath, looked her in the face, and said “I won’t do it.” After a shocked, confused look and some questioning, I explained what had happened. I told her if they wanted it back in that the licensed floor nurses could do it themselves, but I wasn’t going to force something on a patient that the patient clearly doesn’t want. She quietly nodded in understanding and told me what I was doing was okay. The floor nurses went into the room and discussed the NG tube again but this time the daughter said “No, we’re going to wait until [the family] is here and we’ll discuss it.” The floor nurses were irritated, the doctor was mad, but I felt validated. I felt like my nursey-gut hadn’t let me down and I’d just advocated for a patient and their family for the first time.Over the course of that shift, the family discussed comfort care and ultimately made that hard decision. That patient passed away four days later with her family beside her. I’ll never forget her.