Outcome Assessment in Advanced Practice Nursing

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In today's health care environment, advanced practice nurses (APNs) are evaluated by accreditation agencies, government agencies, and others on their outcomes in patient care, economics, efficiency, processes, quality improvement, and many other areas. As such, the emphasis of assessing outcomes has become an important aspect of advanced practice nursing. But how can APNs know how to assess outcomes for each specific type of practice? This book is a great source of guidance in assessing outcomes for any APN, nurse educator, APN student, nurse researcher, or administrative nurse. This book teaches APNs how to begin and follow the process of outcomes measurement and management.

The editor describes patient outcomes as the end result of medical treatments or interventions. She also notes that outcomes are used to evaluate whether the patient care is effective by measuring patients' physical and functional improvement, well-being, lack of adverse effects of care, patient satisfaction, and symptom relief. This book discusses these outcomes, which are specific to APN roles.

As an acute nurse practitioner, the editor of this book has the background and experience as a caregiver, researcher, and author to be considered an authority in outcome assessment for APNs. She encourages APNs to focus on outcome assessment and evaluation of care as a continual role within their practice. By incorporating this role, she says, APNs justify their contribution to health care and demonstrate that they deliver high-quality care that is comparable or superior to that of other care providers.

Through real-life examples, this book helps APNs understand how their practice can influence care delivery and outcomes. Through discussion and presentation of APN nursing outcomes research and outcome measurements in all areas of advance practice nursing, the author helps APNs understand how to measure outcomes of daily practice.

Because this book is the second edition, there are many updates of useful tools and methods for APNs to measure the outcomes of their practice. There are also several new chapters added in this edition. They include community primary care and ambulatory patient settings, locating instruments for APN outcome assessment, and a focus on the international development with APN research data collection.

Advanced practice nurses are often the most familiar with the clinical problems that need to be studied within various patient care settings and because of this, they are the most appropriate clinicians to develop and participate in outcome-based activities. Since the field of outcomes measurement is expanding so quickly, this book is a timely tool kit to guide APNs.

A precise, complete literature review is summarized within easy-to-read tables and includes studies assessing APN care-related, patient-related, performance-related, and economic outcomes. The editor notes that these studies help to build the scientific evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness and value-added benefits of APNs. Even though many APNs are not in revenue-producing positions, their work still adds value to patient care, performance, and economic outcomes as evidenced by the research studies presented within these literature reviews.

One portion of this book gives an overview of data collection. Because data collection is time consuming, it should be

Good practical examples of role focus are given for the acute care nurse practitioner on the medical acute care floor, unit educator, and clinical nurse specialist.

If an APN has never designed or implemented outcomes assessments, this book gives good step-by-step instructions and discusses real challenges, including the four most common design problems, and four implementation challenges. The chapter on locating instruments and measures guides readers to many online resources and references that are current, easy to use, and take into consideration the continual expansion of Internet resources as well as the practitioner's increased access to electronic resources.

Finally, several chapters are individually dedicated to nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, clinical nurse midwives, and certified registered nurse anesthetists with specifics on outcome assessment and management in each of these practice areas. This book is a great reference and should be used in APN classroom education and by APNs currently in practice because the ready-to-use-tools within its pages will expand the skills of all APNs.