Friday, September 27, 2002: 3:00 PM-4:30 PM

Patient Centered Interventions

Patient-centered interventional research examines the structure, delivery, and outcomes of nursing care strategies that are created mindful of selected patient characteristics, such as values, beliefs, and habits. In addition, patient-centered interventions are delivered in a manner mindful of the context within which the patient dwells, for it is within this context that the resources available to the patient and the barriers that might hinder the patient exist. In this symposium, five members of our training initiative in patient centered informational interventions present our conceptual definition of patient centered interventions and describe some of our experiences from three years of effort to systematically develop and test patient centered interventions. Notably, two members of our team expand the concept of patient from an individual to a family or care giving dyad; their papers provide a theoretical justification for expanding the concept of patient from individual to family unit. A third paper evaluates tailored information interventions, one of the most common approaches to patient centered interventions. The final paper examines patient centered interventions in the context of contemporary clinical care, exploring the nursing resources required to deliver patient centered interventions and proposing a mechanism to augment professional nursing resources with innovative information technologies. Research on patient centered interventions is characterized not only by its attention to approaches that capitalize on, or mitigate, salient patient characteristics but also by a unique philosophical perspective. In contrast to existing studies of nursing interventions, which employ systematic approaches to insure the integrity and reproducibility of an intervention, delivered to several patients, patient centered interventional research begins with an exploration of the individual's unique life situation as a guide for designing creative nursing responses. This perspective commands attention to anchoring interventions in the existing state of the patient, directing exploration of the physical, social, environmental, educational, and cultural aspects of the person or group. Patient-centered interventional research replaces well-accepted caveats employed in other research settings with methods designed to select salient dimensions of individuals and create sensitive strategies. Thus, what becomes important in patient centered interventional research is not the consistency with which the elements of the intervention are delivered, but rather the consistency with which the elements of the intervention match the dimension of the patient. This symposium builds on and expands our initial offering from two years ago in which we first examined the concept of patient centered interventions as a type of informational intervention and delineated several approaches to them. As we have grown in our understanding of the nature of patient centered interventions we have recognizes that their true value to nursing and to patients lies in the ability to (1) efficiently determine the appropriate unit that is labeled "the patient”; (2) designing research that provides true tests of the interventions, and (3) illuminating those characteristics of the care giving context that must be in place to insure the feasibility of employing patient centered intervention in practice.
Organizer:Karen A. Kehl, RN, MS, CHPN, predoctoral fellow patient centered informational interventions
Patient Centered Interventions
Diane R. Lauver, RN, PhD, CS, FAAN, professor, Sandra E. Ward, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor, Susan M. Heidrich, RN, PhD, associate professor, Mary L. Keller, RN, PhD, associate professor, Barbara J. Bowers, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor, Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, FAAN, FACMI, professor, Karin T. Kirchhoff, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor, Thelma J. Wells, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor
Shared Care: Validity, Reliability, and Hypothesis Testing
Margaret Sebern, RN, PhD, post doctoral fellow Patient Centered Informational Interventions
The Family as the Patient in End-of-Life Care
Karen A. Kehl, RN, MS, CHPN, predoctoral fellow - Patient Centered Informational Interventions
Tailored Interventions: Clarification, Efficacy, and Implications for Future Research
Polly A Ryan, RN, PhD, post-doctoral fellow, Diane R. Lauver, RN, PhD, CS, FAAN, professor
Patient-centered Interventions in the Context of the Existing Health Care Delivery System
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, FAAN, FACMI, professor

The Advancing Nursing Practice Excellence: State of the Science