Fundamental care is often considered the foundation of nursing practice, underpinning seminal nursing theories as well as frameworks and guidelines for care delivery.
Despite the centrality of fundamental care to nursing practice and care outcomes, internationally, care recipients report negative experiences of this care, including missed, infrequent, or poor-quality mouth care, toileting, bathing, mobility, information provision, education, and psychosocial support. In turn, care recipients experience numerous adverse outcomes when fundamental care is poorly delivered.
To support nursing leaders in changing deeply entrenched organisational cultures and value systems on fundamental care, they must have the knowledge and skills to advocate for this care in a politically informed way and to foster sustainable change.
The International Learning Collaborative (ILC) is supporting nursing leaders to develop the skills required to affect real systems change for fundamental care.
It has been a long-held vision of the ILC to grow a critical mass of leaders globally who are courageous and skilled to champion and lead change. To achieve this vision, the ILC has engaged with current and emerging nursing leaders worldwide to codesign the Fundamentals of Care Leadership Program.
The program aims to enhance the capacity of current and emerging nursing leaders within research, education, clinical practice, and policy to advocate for and affect systems change around fundamental care, thus ensuring the delivery of high-quality fundamental care within any health or care environment.
The below article outlines the collaborative codesign process undertaken to develop the leadership program and considers how this program might be sustained into the future.
Article by Rebecca Feo, Susanne Pearce, Alison Kitson, and Tiffany Conroy
College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University
Or follow the link here – https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jonm/2023/1318377/