Improving patient outcomes
THE Covid-19 pandemic put nurses and the work they do to save and improve lives firmly on the frontline of health care and the front pages of news outlets.
On International Nurses Day on Thursday, we celebrated the work of nurses and hospital workers who continue to experience pressure from the ongoing pandemic.
Among them, nurse researchers straddle the worlds of academia and clinical practice.
With hospital wards as their laboratories, they have a unique perspective on translating research into improved patient results.
“Nurse researchers seek to understand what works and what doesn’t in nursing practice, and why, to continuously improve patient care,” said Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Professor Tracey Bucknall, foundational chair in nursing and director of nursing at Alfred Health and director of Deakin’s Centre for Quality and Patient Safety Research Alfred Health partnership.
“We work with clinicians, academics, patients and families, hospital management and policymakers to ensure our research
is relevant to the communities we serve.”
A nurse for 40 years, Prof Bucknall is recognised nationally and internationally as a decision scientist and knowledge translation expert in health care.
Her research involves international and interdisciplinary collaborations in nursing, aged care, decision-making, patient safety and knowledge translation.
In 2018, she was awarded a Fellowship of the American Academy of Nursing and in 2019 she was inducted into the International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame.
Prof Bucknall’s research centres on clinical decisionAustralia, making, tackling patient safety problems, symptom management of patients across clinical settings, improving communication between patients, families and clinicians, and improving implementation of research evidence in practice to improve patient outcomes.
Her work has informed nursing textbooks, the development of National Health and Medical Research Council clinical guidelines and decision aids, and national safety and quality health service standards.
“As nurse researchers, we observe clinicians, patients and their families and interview them about their decisions around treatments and care,” she said.
“By understanding how health professionals and patients make decisions, we may well be able to improve those decisions.”
Prof Bucknall said nursing was “an extremely fulfilling occupation” that offered opportunities to work in varied settings around the world.
“We deal with people across the lifespan, in sickness and in health,” she said.
“When individuals and families are feeling the most vulnerable, it is frequently a nurse beside them, monitoring and supporting them.”
When Covid broke out in it had an immediate impact on the clinical work and research of Prof Bucknall and her colleagues.
“We had to have all hands on deck straight away to troubleshoot new problems and provide evidence to support management and clinical decisions,” she said.
Prof Bucknall turned her research focus to help hospitals respond to the impact of Covid on delivering patient care, drawing on her multidisciplinary research collaborations in projects that tested the effectiveness of temperature screening equipment such as infra-red thermal cameras and thermometers and sensor contact-tracing devices.
Prof Bucknall and her team also evaluated face masks for preventing pressure injuries, and studied the impact on patients and families of restricted visitation and the effect on staff wellbeing during Covid.
In work that will have an impact beyond Covid, Prof Bucknall and her team identified gaps in managing patients in isolation, a project that has since gained external funding to test the effectiveness of intervention to improve isolated patient care.