TAXONOMIC ANALYSIS OF NURSE SPECIALIST FUNCTIONS IN TRANSITIONAL FOLLOWUP CARE.
Contributors: University of Pennsylvania.
Published: 1991
Number of pages: 140
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The purpose of this study was to explore, identify, and describe nursing functions employed in the provision of Transitional Followup Care. Transitional Followup Care was designed to accomplish earlier hospital discharge by substituting a portion of hospital care with a comprehensive program of discharge planning and home followup by nurse specialists.

The sample consisted of nursing process recordings and nurse specialist and client interviews about the nature of Transitional Followup Care provided by six nurse specialists to 22 subjects enrolled in the experimental group of the Early Discharge and Nurse Specialist Followup Program Project Grant. Subjects included women who had a cesarean birth, women who had pregnancies complicated by diabetes and hypertension, and women who had undergone a hysterectomy.

Nursing functions were categorized according to the existing Taxonomy of Ambulatory Care Nursing (Verran, 1981) to determine its accuracy in describing Transitional Followup Care. While the taxonomy was sufficiently comprehensive in naming the components of Transitional Followup Care it was insufficiently parsimonious, and therefore, inappropriate for use in describing Transitional Followup Care.

Through content analysis of the nursing process recordings and transcriptions of nurse specialist and client interviews, the Taxonomy of Transitional Followup Care was developed. The nursing process (Yura & Walsh, 1988) was adopted as the framework for the Taxonomy. The nursing process components of assessment, diagnosis, plan of care, interventions, and evaluation serve as the five major categories of the Taxonomy. Subcategories for each were named and definitions developed.

The categories of assessment and intervention captured a majority of the functions. Variance was noted between the written and oral reports of nursing activities. Variance was also noted between the nurse specialist's reports of the care they provided and the client's perceptions of the care they received. Discussion of results focuses on descriptions of nursing functions according to the Taxonomy of Transitional Followup Care Nursing and the differences between nurse and client reports. Implications for nursing practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-03, Section: B, page: 1346.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1991.

School code: 0175.