Patterns of nursing: a review of nursing in a large metropolitan hospital

In this Clinical Practice Development (CPD) project we set out to identify and describe current approaches to the management and delivery of nursing care in an Australian Metropolitan Teaching Hospital. Using a simple descriptive design, data were collected to elicit patterns of care provided by nursing teams. We sought to demonstrate patterns described by nursing teams (interviews) and actual patterns of care (observation). As expected there was a degree of incongruence between the espoused and actual patterns of care. Interview data revealed that most study wards had a view of nursing that emphasizes meeting the total care needs of patients and their families through offering biopsychosocial and educative care. The observational data revealed that a relatively large proportion of time was expended on activities that were not regarded as important by staff when interviewed (e.g. documentation) while relatively small amounts of time were observed to be spent educating patients or communicating with relatives of patients. The identification of this type of gap creates a dissonance in clinicians that can be used to stimulate change through CPD. Clinicians used the information to stimulate discussion and to rewrite team value statements.